Autonomous Vehicle Security: A Taxonomy of Attacks and Defences

TLDR

Autonomous vehicles are emerging as a key component of smart mobility, but their security is a growing concern as they become more connected and deployed in real‑world trials. The paper aims to organize and discuss attack and defense methods for autonomous vehicles and propose a comprehensive taxonomy to guide targeted defenses. The authors construct a taxonomy by categorizing existing attack and defense techniques for autonomous vehicles.

Abstract

In recent years, we have seen significant advancement in technologies to bring about smarter cities worldwide. The interconnectivity of things is the key enabler in these initiatives. An important building block is smart mobility, and it revolves around resolving land transport challenges in cities with dense populations. A transformative direction that global stakeholders are looking into is autonomous vehicles and the transport infrastructure to interconnect them to the traffic management system (that is, vehicle to infrastructure connectivity), as well as to communicate with one another (that is, vehicle to vehicle connectivity) to facilitate better awareness of road conditions. A number of countries had also started to take autonomous vehicles to the roads to conduct trials and are moving towards the plan for larger scale deployment. However, an important consideration in this space is the security of the autonomous vehicles. There has been an increasing interest in the attacks and defences of autonomous vehicles as these vehicles are getting ready to go onto the roads. In this paper, we aim to organize and discuss the various methods of attacking and defending autonomous vehicles, and propose a comprehensive attack and defence taxonomy to better categorize each of them. Through this work, we hope that it provides a better understanding of how targeted defences should be put in place for targeted attacks, and for technologists to be more mindful of the pitfalls when developing architectures, algorithms and protocols, so as to realise a more secure infrastructure composed of dependable autonomous vehicles.