Denial-of-Service Attacks on C-V2X Networks
This addresses security vulnerabilities in safety-critical vehicle communication networks, which is crucial for automotive OEMs and public safety, but it is incremental as it builds on known attack concepts in a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of Denial-of-Service attacks on C-V2X networks by introducing novel attack types based on adversarial resource block selection, showing that smart and cooperative attacks significantly impact performance at low vehicle density, while oblivious attacks are nearly as effective at high density.
Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) networks are increasingly adopted by automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). C-V2X, as defined in 3GPP Release 14 Mode 4, allows vehicles to self-manage the network in absence of a cellular base-station. Since C-V2X networks convey safety-critical messages, it is crucial to assess their security posture. This work contributes a novel set of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on C-V2X networks operating in Mode 4. The attacks are caused by adversarial resource block selection and vary in sophistication and efficiency. In particular, we consider "oblivious" adversaries that ignore recent transmission activity on resource blocks, "smart" adversaries that do monitor activity on each resource block, and "cooperative" adversaries that work together to ensure they attack different targets. We analyze and simulate these attacks to showcase their effectiveness. Assuming a fixed number of attackers, we show that at low vehicle density, smart and cooperative attacks can significantly impact network performance, while at high vehicle density, oblivious attacks are almost as effective as the more sophisticated attacks.