Secure and Trustworthy Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems

Transportation cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have the potential to improve traffic safety, mobility, and environmental protection. However, they are subject to threats stemming from increasing reliance on information and communication technologies (ICT). Cybersecurity threats exploit the increased complexity and connectivity of the transportation-critical infrastructure system, placing the transportation at risk. This chapter reviews the state of the art and the state of the practice of CPS in various transportation sectors, including highway, railway, and air. This chapter also examines various cybersecurity threats to the transportation CPS and the current countermeasures to enhance cybersecurity of these CPS. It then discusses several challenges and opportunities in achieving secure and trustworthy transportation CPS.

With the development of smart sensors, smart vehicles, and vehicular communication technologies, the smart transportation system is proposed and considered to be the future of the transportation critical infrastructure system, aiming to improve traffic efficiency, safety, and security. All vehicles and roadside infrastructures will be deployed with integrated smart sensors and communication units in order that traffic states can be measured and shared via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication networks. With the smart transportation system, diversified services can be provided to customers, including traffic and transportation management, safety management, and others. In addition, the optimal travel for users (e.g., drivers) can be achieved, travel safety can be realized, and road congestion can be reduced in the smart transportation system. Nonetheless, security issues, including illegal access, attacks, unauthorized information sharing, and so on, become challenging in the smart transportation system. In order to understand smart transportation systems such that techniques can be designed to make them secure, this chapter conducts a review of smart transportation systems with respect to architecture, enabling technologies, and open issues. To be specific, a three-layer architecture is first presented for the smart transportation system, including the physical layer, communication layer, and service layer. Then, the detailed components and enabling technologies in each layer are described. Finally, we present some open issues related to security, big data, performance, and evaluation platforms in the smart transportation system.

During the past decades, we have witnessed tremendous advancements in the field of wireless communications, while supporting a wide range of applications. Nevertheless, wireless access has also been shifted towards transportation research and development centers. The integration of embedded devices to transverse heterogeneity into homogeneity, cyber-physical systems (CPS) have been introduced as a subset of the Internet of things (IoT). For example, sensors/actuator systems became responsive to the physical world by enabling real-time control emanating from conventional embedded systems also known as CPS. Likewise, we have several onboard sensors installed inside the vehicles, responsible for sensing different activities within the vehicle and its surroundings such as temperature, intruder detection, and so on. In addition to the general applications for CPS, we have the vehicular cyber-physical systems (VCPS) that is not a new concept. For now, VCPS may refer to a wide range of transportation management systems that are heavily integrated and should be highly accurate, real-time, and efficient. This chapter provides readers with the details of the term “VCPS” followed by the historical overview of this new emerging field including research challenges and future aspects of the VCPS.

Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (TCPS) developed a lot with the advancement of the transportation industry worldwide. The rapid proliferation of TCPS provides rich data and infinite possibilities for us to analyze and understand the complex inherent mechanism that governs the novel intelligence world. Also, TCPS open a range of new application scenarios, such as vehicular safety, energy efficiency, reduced pollution, and intelligent maintenance services. However, while enjoying the services and convenience provided by TCPS, users, vehicles, and even the systems might lose privacy during information transmission and processing. This chapter summarizes the state-of-art research findings on TCPS in a broad sense. First, we introduce the typical TCPS model and their basic mechanism of data communication. Secondly, considering the privacy issues of TCPS, we give a bird’s-eye view of the up-to-date literature on the problems and privacy protection approaches. Thirdly, we point out the most recently emerging challenges and the potential resolutions for privacy issues in TCPS.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) and cyber infrastructure are key elements of the national infrastructure, and securing them is of critical importance to national security. There is ample evidence that these systems are vulnerable to disruption and damage due to natural disasters, social crises, and terrorism. CPS applications are becoming more widespread, ranging from healthcare with patient monitoring systems to autonomous vehicles to integrated electrical power grids. Within these various application domains, transportation cyber-physical systems (TCPS) have become a very important application of CPS, in which various sensing, computing, and control components, such as in-vehicle onboard sensors, traffic surveillance cameras, smartphones carried by pedestrians, and so on, are tightly coupled to enhance the safety and efficiency of the transportation system. There have been security and safety concerns for the deployment of TCPS, such as the Jeep hack in 2015 and Tesla accident in 2016, which clearly demonstrate the urgent need to secure TCPS better. This chapter discusses how to better safeguard TCPS by means of trust management. We first describe the basic concept of trust management, and summarize its application in generalized wireless networks. Then we discuss in detail how the trust management mechanism can benefit the TCPS in particular.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) integrate communications and information technology into the transportation systems to provide a safer and more efficient driving experience. Transmission security is of vital importance for the deployment of ITS systems in practice. In this chapter, secure data dissemination techniques are studied for relay-assisted vehicular communications towards ITS applications. We first briefly review the state of the art of vehicular networking research. Afterwards, we investigate the secure data dissemination issues for both vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) scenarios exploiting the physical-layer security approach. For the V2I scenario, a distributed source-relay selection scheme with anti-eavesdropping capabilities is proposed, for which a source-relay pair is jointly selected to maximize the achievable secrecy rate. For the V2V scenario, a fountain-coding aided relaying scheme is developed. By using this scheme, transmission security is guaranteed as long as the legitimate receiver can accumulate the required number of fountain-coded packets before the eavesdropper does. To satisfy this condition, a constellation-rotation aided cooperative jamming method is utilized to deteriorate the received signal quality at the eavesdropper. To evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy, a novel metric called QoS violating probability (QVP) is further proposed and analyzed. Finally, in the concluding remarks, we summarize the main contributions of our work, and point out some topics that are worthy of investigation in future studies.

In recent years, along with the rapid development of the GNSS (global navigation satellite system), cellular network, and IoT (Internet of things), vehicle networking has entered into a wireless interconnected and intelligent era that makes remote-operating vehicles or sharing information convenient. However, the vehicle wireless networks connected to physical components of vehicles make it possible for hackers to engage in wireless sabotage. This chapter presents various vulnerable physical components, reactions from government and industry against the cyber-attacks, attacking tools, attacking practices, and some mitigation strategies.