Security and Privacy of ITS Standards and Their Research Challenges

Intelligent Transport System (ITS) enables communication among entities on the road, including vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), pedestrians, and cyclists. This communication plays a key role in cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM). As a result of standardization work by standard developing organizations (SDOs) such as IEEE, SAE, and ETSI, ITS standards consist of a number of specifications in both the United States and Europe. However, close examinations of the security and privacy aspects of these standards reveal a number of significant unresolved issues. These security and privacy issues arise from some of the fundamental operational circumstances under which vehicles operate. We discuss various types of adversarial attacks and other system-level issues that have a high impact on road safety. This point raises significant concerns about the integrity of the ITS system. At the same time, new trends in cybersecurity have emerged over the past years, such as the evolution of quantum computers and their threats to break certain mathematical problems, such as those used in public-key cryptography. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States and cybersecurity organizations in Europe have announced timelines to migrate to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms. Being a real-time cyber–physical system (RT CPS), ITS systems also need to adapt to this changing paradigm shift in cybersecurity to ensure that vehicular communication remains secure, resilient, and trustworthy. However, the nature of RT CPS raises its unique problems. This chapter discusses these challenging issues in the security and privacy aspects of ITS standards.