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Abstract
The introduction of 5G and the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture
has enabled more flexible and intelligent network deployments. However, the
increased complexity and openness of these architectures also introduce novel
security challenges, such as data manipulation attacks on the semi-standardised
Shared Data Layer (SDL) within the O-RAN platform through malicious xApps. In
particular, malicious xApps can exploit this vulnerability by introducing
subtle Unicode-wise alterations (hypoglyphs) into the data that are being used
by traditional machine learning (ML)-based anomaly detection methods. These
Unicode-wise manipulations can potentially bypass detection and cause failures
in anomaly detection systems based on traditional ML, such as AutoEncoders,
which are unable to process hypoglyphed data without crashing. We investigate
the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for anomaly detection within the O-RAN
architecture to address this challenge. We demonstrate that LLM-based xApps
maintain robust operational performance and are capable of processing
manipulated messages without crashing. While initial detection accuracy
requires further improvements, our results highlight the robustness of LLMs to
adversarial attacks such as hypoglyphs in input data. There is potential to use
their adaptability through prompt engineering to further improve the accuracy,
although this requires further research. Additionally, we show that LLMs
achieve low detection latency (under 0.07 seconds), making them suitable for
Near-Real-Time (Near-RT) RIC deployments.