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Cyber resilience of autonomous mobility systems: cyber-attacks and resilience-enhancing strategies

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Abstract

The increasing cyber connectivity of vehicles and between vehicles and infrastructure will drastically reshape mobility in the coming decades. While the advent of connected mobility is expected to benefit travelers and the society by smoothing traffic, improving rider convenience, and reducing accidents, the augmented cyber components in connected and autonomous vehicles and related infrastructure also give rise to cyber-attacks to the transportation system. And yet, little attention has been paid to transportation cyber resilience. This paper thus proposes an investigation on this topic with a comprehensive literature review. The cyber components and plausible autonomous mobility systems (AMS) operation scenarios are discussed, before identifying possible cyber-attacks to AMS at both vehicle and system levels. The discussion then moves to existing practices to enhance cybersecurity, and a number of strategies are investigated toward enhancing AMS cyber resilience. At the vehicle level, creating layers and separation to reduce cyber component connectivity and deploying an independent procedure for data collection and processing are important in vehicle design and manufacturing. At the system level, recommended strategies include keeping redundancy in transportation capacity, maintaining a separate road network, and deploying different sub-autonomous mobility systems.

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Acknowledgments

The research presented in this work was funded by the World Bank Group.

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This paper is funded by the World Bank group.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Bo Zou & Pooria Choobchian

  2. World Bank Group, Washington, D.C., USA

    Julie Rozenberg

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  1. Bo Zou
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  2. Pooria Choobchian
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  3. Julie Rozenberg
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Correspondence to Bo Zou.

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Zou, B., Choobchian, P. & Rozenberg, J. Cyber resilience of autonomous mobility systems: cyber-attacks and resilience-enhancing strategies. J Transp Secur 14, 137–155 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12198-021-00230-w

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