| CYBERSECURITY
Annual Showcase 2020 | Intertraffic World
081
V2X security
Are the systems in place to protect connected vehicles robust enough?
It may not take up many
newspaper column inches,
but without SCMS (security
credential management
system), V2V and V2i would
not work.
“It is the first line of
defence against hackers
because it facilitates trusted
communication,” says Sam
Lauzon, an automotive
cybersecurity software
developer at the University
of Michigan (UMTRI), who
has been investigating SCMS
2.0 for the last year.
However, Lauzon,
says the system “is far
from perfect” and could
in theory be infiltrated
by sophisticated statesponsored
hackers. He says
that “there is currently no
infrastructure or standards
in place to identify and stop
a compromised vehicle, or
revoke its ability to sign
messages appropriately”.
He explains, “If a hacker
were to breach the SCMS
there is currently no way
that it would be able to
differentiate between a
compromised vehicle which
is receiving fake information
and one that is receiving
genuine instructions. An
attacker could exploit this
and deliberately cause two
cars to virtually overlap
or provide conflicting
instructions to the driver.”
He explains, “Hackers are relentless and they
will always find an organization’s Achilles’ heel.
For signal operators, the greatest potential
security flaw is not so much the computer
software, but an attack on the data that flows
through the many different sensors that help
better regulate traffic lights.”
Dr Sheng says that if a sensor or a VPN
connection is breached, as in the case of
the Ukrainian Power grid hack, “a virtual
tunnel can be created between the sensor that
feeds the traffic light with information and the
wider network”.
“While the hacker would still find it very
difficult to influence the behaviour of an entire
city’s traffic lights, it might be possible for them
to create gridlock in certain areas of a town or
a city until the flaw was patched.”
But Dr Ben Waterson, a member of the
University of Southampton’s Transportation