5G-based V2V broadcast communications: a security perspective

The V2V services have been specified by the 3GPP standards body to support road safety and non-safety applications in the 5G cellular networks. It is expected to use the direct link (known as the PC5 interface), as well as the new radio interface in 5G, to provide a connectivity platform among vehicles. Particularly, vehicles will use the PC5 interface to broadcast safety messages to inform each other about potential hazards on the road. In order to function safely, robust security mechanisms are needed to ensure the authenticity of received messages and trustworthiness of message senders. These mechanisms must neither add significantly to message latency nor affect the performance of safety applications. The existing 5G-V2V standard allow protection of V2V messages to be handled by higher layer security solutions defined by other standards in the ITS domain. However having a security solution at the 5G access layer is conceivably preferable in order to ensure system compatibility and reduce deployment cost. Accordingly, the main aim of this paper is to review options for 3GPP access layer security in future 5G-V2V releases. Initially, a summary of 5G-V2V communications and corresponding service requirements is presented. An overview of the application level security standards is also given, followed by a review of the impending options to secure V2V broadcast messages at the 5G access layer. Finally, paper presents the relevant open issues and challenges on providing 3GPP access layer security solution for direct V2V communication.