Attacking Vehicular Communications: Road-Map towards Secure Intelligent Transportation Systems (AVESTA)

Purpose and goal

To date, vehicular networks have not yet been adequately investigated from a penetration perspective, particularly with respect to identifying vulnerabilities that can be exploited by an adversary to remotely intrude C2X and in-vehicle communication protocols. AVESTA addressed this challenge by mapping the most important existing threats of in-vehicle communication interfaces, e.g., mobile communications and sensor networks. This, in turn, can help the design of mechanisms capable of reasoning on the overall security capabilities of such complex systems-of-systems.

Expected results and effects

AVESTA is expected to have a significant impact in the aspect of having more secure ITS for efficient transport. It integrates technologies that cut across many diverse sectors, e.g., wireless, embedded microcontrollers, and thus all outcomes can be proven beneficial for many researchers in these areas. With this in hand, produced results on vulnerability analysis can benchmark any subsequent studies on multi-dependency cyber-physical risk assessment and assurance-enhanced communications and operations of vehicles´ on-board units relying on trusted computing techniques.

Planned approach and implementation

AVESTA is built on the collaboration between KTH (Sweden), and its NSS group, and Renault (France). Both partners are members of the C2C-CC and they were already collaborating in the leading FOT EU project in ITS security (PRESERVE). Besides several publications and liaising with targeted scientific groups, this enabled us to do research with VC components that are currently under construction and engage in the analysis process for providing a high level of operational assurance in integrity, security and finally safety in such complex cyber-physical systems-of-systems.