Multi-domain Denial-of-Service Attacks in Internet-of-Vehicles: Vulnerability Insights and Detection Performance

The transformative Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) paradigm comes inadvertently with challenges which involve security vulnerabilities and privacy breaches. In this context, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks may perniciously affect the normal operation of IoV systems by causing extensive periods of network unavailability where legitimate vehicles are prevented from accessing vehicular services. In this paper, we offer an in-depth vulnerability assessment of 5G-enabled IoV systems when DoS attack variants are launched at multiple network domains. We further evaluate the resilience of an IoV-tailored authentication mechanism against DoS attacks under various configurations. A data-driven detection scheme is also proposed to address DoS variants in the radio access network, which take the form of false data injection attacks on the exchanged vehicular information. Our performance assessment with the aid of an open-source dataset reveals that the proposed scheme is able to accurately detect DoS traffic originated from malicious vehicles.