While TIP’s progress update (see separate item) reflects the bright side of Open RAN, with stakeholder engagement, growth in trials and extensive cooperations, there are clouds on the O-RAN horizon too. Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has published a report that warns that multivendor Open RANs carry significant security risks and concluding that insufficient work has been done to address these issues. The government report was commissioned from German consultancy Secunet, which also develops cybersecurity products. The 86-page document concludes that “medium to high security risks emanate from a multiplicity of the interfaces and components specified in O-RAN” and “the current development process of the O-RAN specifications is not guided by the paradigm of ‘security/privacy by design/default’.” It…