Cybersecurity Oriented Architecture to Ensure the Autonomous Vehicles Communication

Abstract

The topic of in-vehicle and V2X communication in autonomous vehicles consists of a variety of different communication protocols, mechanisms, and devices. The implementation and cooperation between these entities and protocols in such a complex system is a rigorous and complicated process that should not only be efficient, robust, flexible, and scalable, but also secure. The security of critical systems such as autonomous vehicles requires a deep understanding of all the individual and distinct components that compose the system. This paper presents a cybersecurity architecture having as purpose to shield the communication security in the autonomous vehicles. For this reason, several well-established cybersecurity tools (e.g. Keycloak, Cloudflare) and communication mechanisms (e.g. MQTT, Kafka) have been combined in this architecture along with a novel statistical-based Intrusion Detection System. All the aforementioned cybersecurity defense mechanisms were selected to protect the entire system pipeline and meet the requirements for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability regarding vehicle communication. To test the performance of the proposed architecture abnormal data have been injected to the system and the results from the experiments conducted highlighted that the proposed solution can achieve its purpose of increased cybersecurity.