Likelihood of Threats to Connected Vehicles

Modern vehicles are connected vehicles whose electronic control units communicate through their in-vehicle networks and they communicate with neighboring vehicles, road side units, personal devices, and service centers. This provides cyber-attackers with the opportunity to communicate with the vehicles and to stage attacks. This paper reports about a case study for estimating the likelihoods of threats for connected vehicles; it provides the results of a survey that we conducted to estimate the likelihoods of 7 threats to connected vehicles. The experts rated 6 threats as very unlikely and one as almost impossible. The levels of the rating scale that we used are: almost impossible, very unlikely, unlikely, likely, and highly likely. The survey shows that attacks on connected vehicles require fast attacks (before being discovered or a change in the attack context occurs) and be staged by experts who have deep knowledge about the targets. It also shows that developing such attacks does not require long time, neither expensive equipment and tools. Thus, cyber-attacks on connected vehicles are not lab experiments anymore; they are real threats for the society.