SPIFFE for Telco Deployments – a Nephio Perspective

“SPIFFE for Telco Deployments – a Nephio Perspective” discusses how emerging trends in telecommunications — like ORAN and advanced 5G core networks — require a disaggregated architecture to scale efficiently. Kubernetes-based deployments are becoming the standard, supported heavily by open-source tools from CNCF and LF projects.

The session focuses on the security challenges encountered by the Nephio SIG-Security team when managing multi-cluster, multi-region, and multi-vendor deployments. It emphasizes the need for secure communication between a Nephio management cluster and various regional/edge clusters, particularly for control plane operations.

The Nephio team recognized SPIFFE (Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone) as a critical foundational layer to establish trusted identities and secure communication across different regions. A specific use case is highlighted around ORAN deployments, where the SMO (Service Management Orchestration) must securely interact with the IMS (Infrastructure Management Service) during infrastructure creation — and how SPIFFE plays a key role in enabling that secure interaction.

Key Takeaways:

• Telco infrastructures are moving toward Kubernetes and cloud-native, disaggregated models (e.g., ORAN, 5G).
• Nephio’s SIG-Security team tackled multi-region, multi-vendor security challenges.
• SPIFFE provides a consistent identity layer critical for secure, scalable operations.
• Real-world example: enabling secure SMO-IMS communication in ORAN deployments.
• SPIFFE was chosen to ensure trusted interactions across multi-cluster and multi-region setups.

About the Speaker

Rahul Jadhav is CTO of AccuKnox, an active security thought leader, and one of the key architects behind Nephio’s security design. With deep experience in cloud-native security, Rahul offers a unique blend of product insight and open-source community engagement, helping build future-ready platforms for telecom and enterprise.

🔗 Learn more about Nephio: https://www.nephio.org
🔗 Explore SPIFFE & SPIRE: https://spiffe.io

#SPIFFE #Nephio #TelcoSecurity #5G #ORAN #WorkloadIdentity #AccuKnox #RahulJadhav #CloudNativeSecurity #CNCF #ZeroTrust #SPIRE #DevSecOps #KubernetesSecurity

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