Denial-of-Service Attacks on C-V2X Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates various denial-of-service attack strategies on C-V2X networks, revealing their effectiveness at different vehicle densities and highlighting security vulnerabilities in safety-critical vehicular communication systems.

Contribution

It introduces novel DoS attack methods on C-V2X Mode 4 networks, analyzing their impact and effectiveness through simulation, which was not previously explored.

Findings

Smart and cooperative attacks significantly disrupt low-density networks.

Oblivious attacks are nearly as effective as sophisticated ones at high density.

Attacks can severely impact safety message delivery in C-V2X networks.

Abstract

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.