A Survey of Cybersecurity Challenges and Mitigation Techniques for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are emerging as the future of the automotive industry for secure, efficient and sustainable mobility. CAVs are being rapidly adapted for passenger transportation, delivery of cargo, disaster management and military reconnaissance missions. CAVs for urban transportation are in line with the evolution of “smart cities.” However, as CAVs belong to the family of cyber-physical systems (CPS), they inherit some of the generic cyber vulnerabilities of CPS. Due to the unique features of vehicular networks, establishing secure communication between vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) has remained a challenge for vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) service providers. The vulnerabilities associated with the multitude of sensors and internal connectivity modules increase the threat of cyber-attack on CAVs by many folds. This necessitates clear identification of the potential threats and classify them in terms of attack mechanisms. This classification will help in mapping the existing security solutions and exploration of new defense strategies for CAVs. This article has conducted a comprehensive survey of the cyber-attacks on CAVs and the ongoing research on the defense mechanisms. This work organizes the cyber-attacks based on the attacker strategies, attack surfaces, and attack vectors. The mitigation strategies are categorized based on the underlying defense approaches such as cryptography, intrusion detection, access control, and authentication in relation to their effectiveness in mitigating different attack categories. This review delves into the current challenges and explores future research directions in the domain of cybersecurity of CAVs.