5G Vehicle-to-Everything at the Cross-Borders: Security Challenges and Opportunities

peer reviewed5G Vehicle-to-Everything (5G-V2X) communications will play a vital role in the development of the automotive industry. Indeed and thanks to the Network Slicing (NS) concept of 5G and beyond networks (B5G), unprecedented new vehicular use–cases can be supported on top of the same physical network. NS promises to enable the sharing of common network infrastructure and resources while ensuring strict traffic isolation and providing necessary network resources to each NS. However, enabling NS in vehicular networks brings new security challenges and requirements that automotive or 5G standards have not yet addressed. Attackers can exploit the weakest link in the slicing chain, connected and automated vehicles, to violate the slice isolation and degrade its performance. Furthermore, these attacks can be more powerful, especially if they are produced in cross-border areas of two countries, which require an optimal network transition from one operator to another. Therefore, this article aims to provide an overview of newly enabled 5G-V2X slicing use cases and their security issues while focusing on cross-border slicing attacks. It also presents the open security issues of 5G-V2X slicing and identifies some opportunities