Security and Privacy Challenges in 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks

Recently, many academic institutions and standardization organizations have conducted research on vehicular communications based on LTE or 5G. As the most important standardization organization of cellular systems, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has been developing the standard supporting vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services based on LTE, and has already prepared the roadmap toward 5G-based V2X services. With the emergence of new technologies and applications, such as connected autonomous vehicles, 5G-enabled vehicular networks face a variety of security and privacy challenges, which have not been fully investigated. In this article, we first present the infrastructure of 5G-enabled vehicular networks. Then the essential security and privacy aspects of V2X in LTE specified by 3GPP are introduced. After that, as a case study, we investigate the security and privacy issues of a 5G-enabled autonomous platoon, and propose several candidate solutions, including secure group setup with privacy preservation, distributed group key management, and cooperative message authentication. Finally, we discuss the security and privacy challenges in 5G-enabled vehicular networks.