A Preliminary Security Assessment of 5G V2X

Research on intelligent transport systems (ITS) for improved traffic safety and efficiency has reached a high level of maturity and first applications will hit the market in 2019. Since 2004, the wireless standard 802.11p has been developed specifically for ITS services. Since then new telecommunication standards have been devised, and the new 5G telecommunication standard is nearing completion. Due to its technological advantages such as higher speeds and reliability, it is being considered to be used for ITS services. The new radio technology "New Radio (NR)'', which is being developed as part of 5G, can complement or replace 802.11p in V2X applications. While there has been some work to compare 802.11p and 5G New Radio in terms of performance and applicability for safety-critical use cases, little work has been done to investigate the implications for security. In this paper, we provide an overview of the security requirements of known ETSI ITS use cases, and based on those use cases we compare and assess the security implications of replacing 802.11p with cellular V2X. We find that due to the use of millimeter waves, beamforming and massive MIMO, there will be an implicit improvement for confidentiality and privacy, and it may also be possible to shorten authentication procedures in certain cases. When a fully network-assisted C-V2X mode is chosen, it is also possible to outsource several of the ITS security requirements to the cellular network.