Security Analysis of Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs): Challenges, Issues, Defenses, and Open Problems

Our world is evolving into a landscape of smart cities, with connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) occupying a central role in the paradigm of smart mobility. To ensure road and public safety, transportation productivity, employment opportunities, and cost-effectiveness, the CAVs can be the pioneers in the overall transportation system. Renowned automobile companies are transforming and expanding their market into CAVs as future cars by creating additional AV wings in their industries. However, having modern technologies, these cars face unique challenges in operation and can be intended to be attacked by malicious entities. In this survey paper, we classified the attacks in terms of issues arising into three sectors of autonomous vehicles (AVs) – AV forensics, AV communications, and OTA updates for AV. We emphasize the security analysis by discussing several challenges, attack scenarios and defenses, and a few open problems. We anticipate that our paper will serve as a valuable resource for readers and apprentices working on attacks and defenses on connected autonomous vehicles.