An MEC-based DoS Attack Detection Mechanism for C-V2X Networks

Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) as a wireless communication technology has been widely investigated to guarantee road safety and support autonomous driving. Nevertheless, due to high-mobility of nodes and time-varying topology of networks, C-V2X networks always face many security threats. We identify a new Denial of Service (DoS) attack in which a small number of nodes maliciously reserve the communication resources in a C-V2X network by requesting high priority V2X services frequently. A malicious vehicle detection scheme is then developed to defend against this attack. Different from the detection methods based on traffic analysis, the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) server only needs to focus on detecting nodes with high malicious probability in our scheme. Thus, we propose a model to estimate the probability that a node is malicious based on its communication resources consumption state. Simulation results demonstrate not only the feasibility of our attack but also desirable performance of the proposed malicious node detection mechanism.