A Comprehensive Survey of Threats in Platooning—A Cloud-Assisted Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Application

Abstract

Cloud-Assisted Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) are set to revolutionise road safety, providing substantial societal and economic advantages. However, with the evolution of CCAV technology, security and privacy threats have increased. Although several studies have been published around the threat and risk estimation aspects of CCAV, limited research exists on the security implications and emerging threat landscapes in the CCAV platooning application. We conducted an extensive review and categorisation of real-world security incidents and created an account of 132 threats from scholarly sources and 64 threats from recorded events in practice. Furthermore, we defined thirty-one (31) trust domains and outlined eight (8) unique attack vectors to supplement existing research efforts for the systematic security analysis of such cyberinfrastructures. Using these findings, we create a detailed attack taxonomy to communicate threat-related information in CCAV and platooning applications and highlight emerging challenges and ways to safeguard the broader CCAV systems. This work acts as a roadmap to existing researchers and practitioners advocating for a ‘security and privacy by design’ framework for a dynamically evolving CCAV threat landscape.