Autonomous Vehicle: Security by Design

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of security-by-design principles for autonomous vehicles, highlighting the unique challenges and proposing a foundational framework to enhance security in complex, interconnected AV systems.

Contribution

It develops a security-by-design framework for autonomous vehicles from first principles, addressing the lack of such a systematic approach in current AV security practices.

Findings

Identification of core security issues in AVs

Development of a foundational security-by-design framework

Highlighting technical challenges in AV security

Abstract

Security of (semi)-autonomous vehicles is a growing concern, first, due to the increased exposure of the functionality to the potential attackers; second, due to the reliance of car functionalities on diverse (semi)-autonomous systems; third, due to the interaction of a single vehicle with myriads of other smart systems in an urban traffic infrastructure. Beyond these technical issues, we argue that the security-by-design principle for smart and complex autonomous systems, such as an Autonomous Vehicle (AV) is poorly understood and rarely practiced. Unlike traditional IT systems, where the risk mitigation techniques and adversarial models are well studied and developed with security design principles such as security perimeter and defence-in-depth, the lack of such a framework for connected autonomous systems is plaguing the design and implementation of a secure AV. We attempt to identify the core issues of securing an AV. This is done methodically by developing a security-by-design framework for AV from the first principle. Subsequently, the technical challenges for AV security are identified.