A simplified approach for dynamic security risk management in connected and autonomous vehicles

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to offer safer and more efficient transportation. However, such vehicles operate in complex heterogeneous environments and it is therefore essential to control the dynamic risks that the CAVs face during operation. Given that CAVs can be seriously impacted by cyber-attacks, their security issues have been investigated widely. However, existing approaches fail to adequately consider the dynamicity of the risks that arise and present methods to capture the changes in risks and adaptive mitigations. To bridge these gaps, this paper proposes a systematic approach, which comprises of three modules: a knowledge-based system to support the identification of the critical threats, a monitoring module to detect the changes in security context of the CAV and its surrounding environments, and a simplified assessment module to capture the dynamic risks and adjust the mitigations as needed. We investigate a case study of CAV platooning to evaluate our proposal.