Hand it Over Carefully: Security Breach during Handover in 5G-V2X

Vehicular communication draws much interest among researchers due to its prospective applications in traffic safety, ubiquitous connectivity, and infotainment. Vehicular networks are integrated with Fifth-Generation (5G) technology to create a 5G vehicle-to-everything (5G-V2X) communication network to inherit the advanced properties of 5G. 5G-V2X provides comfort, reliability, and security to vehicular users' data. However, one of the serious challenges in the 5G-V2X is Handover (HO) procedure when the vehicle moves from one base station to another. At the time of handover, there are some attacks possible such as impersonation attack, Denial of Service (DoS) attack, Man in the Middle attack, etc. In our work, we examine the possible impersonation attack during HO which leads to DoS. We demonstrate the attack by rogue Femto Access Point (FAP) during HO. A vehicle that becomes an attacker by impersonating one of the legitimate FAPs during HO causes DoS attacks by blocking the communication of nearby vehicles. This may be critical to life. Hence, we proposed an attack detection model for the given scenario which is based on HO Failure Ratio (HFR) and Radio Link Failure (RLF). We proposed the attack model and demonstrated the impact of the attack in 5G-V2X by packet loss rate, throughput, block rate, and HFR. Our attack detection method helps to detect the attack efficiently and is also faster than an existing approach.