Biblio

Modern vehicles are opening up, with wireless interfaces such as Bluetooth integrated in order to enable comfort and safety features. Furthermore a plethora of aftermarket devices introduce additional connectivity which contributes to the driving experience. This connectivity opens the vehicle to potentially malicious attacks, which could have negative consequences with regards to safety. In this paper, we survey vehicles with Bluetooth connectivity from a threat intelligence perspective to gain insight into conditions during real world driving. We do this in two ways: firstly, by examining Bluetooth implementation in vehicles and gathering information from inside the cabin, and secondly, using war-nibbling (general monitoring and scanning for nearby devices). We find that as the vehicle age decreases, the security (relatively speaking) of the Bluetooth implementation increases, but that there is still some technological lag with regards to Bluetooth implementation in vehicles. We also find that a large proportion of vehicles and aftermarket devices still use legacy pairing (and are therefore more insecure), and that these vehicles remain visible for sufficient time to mount an attack (assuming some premeditation and preparation). We demonstrate a real-world threat scenario as an example of the latter. Finally, we provide some recommendations on how the security risks we discover could be mitigated.

With the advances in the areas of mobile computing and wireless communications, V2X systems have become a promising technology enabling deployment of applications providing road safety, traffic efficiency and infotainment. Due to their increasing popularity, V2X networks have become a major target for attackers, making them vulnerable to security threats and network conditions, and thus affecting the safety of passengers, vehicles and roads. Existing research in V2X does not effectively address the safety, security and performance limitation threats to connected vehicles, as a result of considering these aspects separately instead of jointly. In this work, we focus on the analysis of the tradeoffs between safety, security and performance of V2X systems and propose a dynamic adaptability approach considering all three aspects jointly based on application needs and context to achieve maximum safety on the roads using an Internet of vehicles. Experiments with a simple V2V highway scenario demonstrate that an adaptive safety/security approach is essential and V2X systems have great potential for providing low reaction times.