Security in the 6G-Enabled Internet of Vehicles: An Extended Review

The transition from a fifth-generation Internet of Vehicles to a sixth-generation deployment target reshapes the security problem rather than just renaming it. Terahertz radio, intelligent reflecting surfaces, AI-native control planes, integrated terrestrial-aerial-satellite coverage, and sub-millisecond reaction loops introduce attack surfaces that 5G never had to defend, and they do so inside a safety-critical setting where a single missed brake signal cannot be excused on uptime grounds. This review reads thirty-three pieces of recent literature as a single defence pipeline that runs from in-vehicle sensors to the standards-aligned orchestration layer. It groups the surveyed work around four organising questions: what does the 6G-IoV stack actually look like, how is each layer being attacked, what learning and cryptographic mechanisms are proposed against those attacks, and how trustworthy are the published results once the threat model is held to a stricter standard. Two thematic tables compare concrete defence frameworks and survey-type works, a separate table summarises the cryptographic and zero-trust primitives that now appear in 6G-IoV designs, and a research-gap section follows. Five themes recur across the reviewed papers: shallow or opaque threat modelling, single-dataset evaluation regimes, immature post-quantum readiness, an almost complete absence of safety-coupled performance metrics, and the lack of red-team studies that would expose the distance between in-distribution accuracy and adversarial robustness.