Although the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) and 3GPP Cellular V2X deployments are imminent, their standards do not yet cover an important security aspect; the message content plausibility check. In safety-critical driving situations, vehicles cannot blindly trust the content of received safety messages, because an attacker may have forged false values in it in order to cause unsafe response from the receiving vehicles. In particular, the attacks mounted from remote, well-hidden positions around roads are considered the most apparent danger. So far, there have been three approaches to validating V2X message content: checking based on sensor fusion, behavior analysis, and communication constraints. This paper discusses the three existing approaches. In addition, it discusses a communication-based checking scheme that supplements the existing approaches. It uses low-power transmission of vehicle identifiers to identify remote attackers. We demonstrate its potential address in the case of an autonomous vehicle platooning application.
Keywords: V2V communication; message contents plausibility; power control.