Secure CV2X Using COTS Smartphones over LTE Infrastructure

With the proliferation of vehicle technologies to support sophisticated features like assisted and autonomous driving, advanced communication protocols like cellular-vehicle-to-everything (CV2X) have been proposed. However, practical large-scale deployments have been hindered due to caveats such as hardware, security, and cellular infrastructure demands. This work presents and evaluates a practical approach to utilizing ARM TrustZone to turn commercial off-the-shelf smartphones into secure CV2X radios that communicate over the LTE network. These smartphone-based CV2x radios communicate with each other via an intermediary server placed outside/within the LTE infrastructure without affecting normal operations of the phone, like using navigation, calls, and music. Vehicle owners would only have to install the CV2X application to use their smartphones as CV2X radios. The approach would boost the adoption of CV2X by reducing the requirement for dedicated hardware and reusing existing infrastructure. In this work, we empirically evaluate the on-device overhead coupled with various network topologies concerning the location of an intermediary server and the LTE infrastructure. We show that our proposed approach can meet the required real-time constraints for safe CV2X operation while ensuring the integrity of the on-device communication from manipulation by remote attackers.