Zero-knowledge-proof for moral hazard detection in O-RAN without benchmarks: let us play WereWolf game!

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PIMRC62392.2025.11274934

The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) paradigm fosters multi-vendor interoperability, allowing modules from different vendors to cooperatively handle network functions, such as temporary data processing or sensor data collection for network operations optimization. However, this integration agility introduces the risk of selecting suboptimal or adversarial modules, leading to moral hazard. Traditional Moral Hazard testing approaches typically rely on a benchmarking data set in addition to historical performance score. However, they deemed impractical, as vendor-supplied modules may not reveal their outputs before deployment, and the network may lack direct access to reference results for validation. This challenge is further compounded by the dynamic nature of network elements and AI-driven models, whose performance can degrade over time due to malicious tampering, obsolescence, or device deterioration, making historical quality assessments ineffective. In this paper, we address the challenge of identifying legitimate vendor-supplied modules among adversarial ones, with respect to a given network functionality/operation, in the absence of benchmarks. We propose a benchmark-free test framework that detects and eliminates adversarial modules using a methodology inspired by the WereWolf game, combined with zero-knowledge proof techniques. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that our approach effectively removes adversarial entities while preserving the privacy of legitimate modules.