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Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are envisioned to enhance safety and efficiency on the road, increase productivity, and positively impact the urban transportation system. Due to recent developments in autonomous driving (AD) technology, AVs have started moving on the road. However, this promising technology has many unique security challenges that have the potential to cause traffic accidents. Though some researchers have exploited and addressed specific security issues in AD, there is a lack of a systematic approach to designing security solutions using a comprehensive threat model. A threat model analyzes and identifies potential threats and vulnerabilities. It also identifies the attacker model and proposes mitigation strategies based on known security solutions. As an emerging cyber-physical system, the AD system requires a well-designed threat model to understand the security threats and design solutions. This paper explores security issues in the AD system and analyzes the threat model using the STRIDE threat modeling process. We posit that our threat model-based analysis will help improve AVs' security and guide researchers toward developing secure AVs. 

Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have fostered the development of intelligent transportation systems that support critical safety information sharing with minimum latency and making driving decisions autonomously. However, the CAV environment is vulnerable to different external and internal attacks. Authorized but malicious entities which provide wrong information impose challenges in preventing internal attacks. An essential requirement for thwarting internal attacks is to identify the trustworthiness of the vehicles. This paper exploits interaction provenance to propose a trust management framework for CAVs that considers both in-vehicle and vehicular network security incidents, supports flexible security policies and ensures privacy. The framework contains an interaction provenance recording and trust management protocol that extracts events from interaction provenance and calculates trustworthiness using fuzzy policies based on the events. Simulation results show that the framework is effective and can be integrated with the CAV stack with minimal computation and communication overhead. 

Connected vehicles (CVs) have facilitated the development of intelligent transportation system that supports critical safety information sharing with minimum latency. However, CVs are vulnerable to different external and internal attacks. Though cryptographic techniques can mitigate external attacks, preventing internal attacks imposes challenges due to authorized but malicious entities. Thwarting internal attacks require identifying the trustworthiness of the participating vehicles. This paper proposes a trust management framework for CVs using interaction provenance that ensures privacy, considers both in-vehicle and vehicular network security incidents, and supports flexible security policies. For this purpose, we present an interaction provenance recording and trust management protocol. Different events are extracted from interaction provenance, and trustworthiness is calculated using fuzzy policies based on the events. 

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on on-board sensors and computation capabilities to drive on the road with limited or no human intervention. However, autonomous driving decisions can go wrong for numerous reasons, leading to accidents on the road. The AVs lack a proper forensics investigation framework, which is essential for various reasons such as resolving insurance disputes, investigating attacks, compliance with autonomous driving safety guidelines, etc. To design robust and safe AVs, identifying the actual reason behind any incident involving the AV is crucial. Hence, it is essential to collect meaningful logs from different autonomous driving modules and store them in a secure and tamper-proof way. In this paper, we propose AVGuard, a forensic investigation framework that collects and stores the autonomous driving logs. The framework can generate and verify proofs to ensure the integrity of collected logs while preventing collusion attacks among multiple dishonest parties. The stored logs can be used later by investigators to identify the exact incident. Our proof-of-concept implementation shows that the framework can be integrated with autonomous driving modules efficiently without any significant overheads. 

Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) have achieved significant improvements in recent years. The CAVs can share sensor data to improve autonomous driving performance and enhance road safety. CAV architecture depends on roadside edge servers for latency-sensitive applications. The roadside edge servers are equipped with high-performance embedded edge computing devices that perform calculations with low power requirements. As the number of vehicles varies over different times of the day and vehicles can request for different CAV applications, the computation requirements for roadside edge computing platform can also vary. Hence, a framework for dynamic deployment of edge computing platforms can ensure CAV applications’ performance and proper usage of the devices. In this paper, we propose R-CAV – a framework for drone-based roadside edge server deployment that provides roadside units (RSUs) based on the computation requirement. Our proof of concept implementation for object detection algorithm using Nvidia Jetson nano demonstrates the proposed framework's feasibility. We posit that the framework will enhance the intelligent transport system vision by ensuring CAV applications’ quality of service. 

The safety of distracted pedestrians presents a significant public health challenge in the United States and worldwide. An estimated 6,704 American pedestrians died and over 200,000 pedestrians were injured in traffic crashes in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This number is increasing annually and many researchers posit that distraction by smartphones is a primary reason for the increasing number of pedestrian injuries and deaths. One strategy to prevent pedestrian injuries and death is to use intrusive interruptions that warn distracted pedestrians directly on their smartphones. To this end, we developed StreetBit, a Bluetooth beacon-based mobile application that alerts distracted pedestrians with a visual and/or audio interruption when they are distracted by their smartphones and are approaching a potentially-dangerous traffic intersection. In this paper, we present the background, architecture, and operations of the StreetBit Application. 

Security is a huge challenge in vehicular networks due to the large size of the network, high mobility of nodes, and continuous change of network topology. These challenges are also applicable to the vehicular fog, which is a new computing paradigm in the context of vehicular networks. In vehicular fog computing, the vehicles serve as fog nodes. This is a promising model for latency-sensitive and location-aware services, which also incurs some unique security and privacy issues. However, there is a lack of a systematic approach to design security solutions of the vehicular fog using a comprehensive threat model. Threat modeling is a step-by-step process to analyze, identify, and prioritize all the potential threats and vulnerabilities of a system and solve them with known security solutions. A well-designed threat model can help to understand the security and privacy threats, vulnerabilities, requirements, and challenges along with the attacker model, the attack motives, and attacker capabilities. Threat model analysis in vehicular fog computing is critical because only brainstorming and threat models of other vehicular network paradigms will not provide a complete scenario of potential threats and vulnerabilities. In this paper, we have explored the threat model of vehicular fog computing and identified the threats and vulnerabilities using STRIDE and CIAA threat modeling processes. We posit that this initiative will help to improve the security and privacy system design of vehicular fog computing.