Key security challenges for cloud-assisted connected and autonomous vehicles

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) bring situational awareness to vehicles promising a safer transportation system. To support collaborative awareness, cloud-assisted CAV are being developed besides Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. CAVs require efficient and accurate information from numerous sources, internal and external to the vehicle, for time-critical safety applications. As such, cloud-assisted CAVs would be exposed to a large amount of dynamic information (such as speed, location, vehicle ID, travel routes, passengers' personal information, bank details and so on). Moreover, CAVs have a reasonably long lifetime due to which the associated vehicular technologies in CAVs age and it is possible that vulnerabilities can be exploited to inflict harm. As a result, when technologies change, the security requirements evolve. This research aims to discuss significant research challenges, classify emerging threats, attacks and countermeasures and identify immediate research directions to protect the evolving cloud-assisted CAVs with security mechanisms to adapt to complex and dynamic environments.