[Paper Review] An Overview of Attacks and Defences on Intelligent Connected Vehicles

Mahdi Dibaei, Xi Zheng+10 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jul 17, 2019

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)Engineering165 references34 citations

TL;DR

This survey catalogs security attacks on intelligent connected vehicles and reviews defences, classifying them into four categories and outlining future research directions.

ABSTRACT

Cyber security is one of the most significant challenges in connected vehicular systems and connected vehicles are prone to different cybersecurity attacks that endanger passengers' safety. Cyber security in intelligent connected vehicles is composed of in-vehicle security and security of inter-vehicle communications. Security of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and the Control Area Network (CAN) bus are the most significant parts of in-vehicle security. Besides, with the development of 4G LTE and 5G remote communication technologies for vehicle-toeverything (V2X) communications, the security of inter-vehicle communications is another potential problem. After giving a short introduction to the architecture of next-generation vehicles including driverless and intelligent vehicles, this review paper identifies a few major security attacks on the intelligent connected vehicles. Based on these attacks, we provide a comprehensive survey of available defences against these attacks and classify them into four categories, i.e. cryptography, network security, software vulnerability detection, and malware detection. We also explore the future directions for preventing attacks on intelligent vehicle systems.

Motivation & Objective

• Present an overview of intelligent vehicle system architecture and security requirements.
• Identify major attacks on in-vehicle and inter-vehicle communications and VANETs.
• Survey and classify defense mechanisms against these attacks across four categories.
• Suggest future directions to strengthen security in intelligent vehicle systems.

Proposed method

• Review literature on intelligent vehicle systems and VANETs from high-quality sources (past 10 years).
• Classify attacks and vulnerabilities affecting ECUs, CAN buses, and V2X communications.
• Group defenses into cryptography, network security, software vulnerability detection, and malware detection.
• Synthesize future research directions such as lightweight authentication and software defined security with deep learning.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What is the state of the art of vehicle systems?
• RQ2 What are unique research challenges in securing vehicle systems?
• RQ3 What are the main solutions and their pros and cons?
• RQ4 What are promising solutions to improve security?

Key findings

• The paper provides a structured taxonomy of intelligent vehicle system architecture and security requirements (authentication, integrity, privacy, availability).
• It catalogs attacks on vehicular networks, including DoS, DDoS, black-hole, grey-hole, replay, and Sybil attacks.
• Defences are categorized into cryptography, signature/anomaly-based detection, software vulnerability detection, and malware detection.
• Future directions proposed include lightweight authentication, 3GPP/software-defined security, and deep learning-driven detection mechanisms.
• The study highlights that security defences in in-vehicle and inter-vehicular communications have been underexplored relative to attacks.