Autonomous Vehicle Security: Conceptual Model

Nowadays, we see vehicles with different automation levels; from zero automation to fully automation vehicles. Leading car manufacturers such as Audi, Volkswagen, TESLA along with Google are becoming the lead in autonomous vehicles industry. Autonomous vehicles can have over 100 million lines of code in their modules with large number of messages being exchanged among vehicles. These vehicles have multiple connection points to the Internet. Bad code, misconfiguration and Internet exposure makes these vehicles vulnerable to different kind of malicious attacks. This paper presents a conceptual autonomous vehicle model to better understand the attack surface on autonomous vehicles. In addition, it presents real life scenarios of successful attacks on different models of vehicles. This paper introduces a conceptual model for autonomous vehicles as initial work for threat modeling of autonomous vehicles. In addition, it highlights some of the cyber security attacks on autonomous vehicles.