In the near future with the innovative services and solutions being currently tested and deployed for cars, homes, offices, transport systems, smart cities, etc., the user connectivity will considerably change. It means that smart devices will be connected to the internet and produce a big impact on the internet traffic, increasing the service demand generated by devices and sensors. However most of these devices are vulnerable to attacks. Hence, the security and privacy become a crucial feature to be included in towards its appropriate deployment. Interconnected, cooperative, service-oriented devices and their related hardware/software solutions will contain sensitive data making such systems susceptible to attacks and leakage of information. Therefore, robust secure communication infrastructures must be established to aid suitable deployment. This chapter is a state-of-the-art assessment of US and EU C-ITS security solutions.
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Emerging wireless and mobile communication networks are on the rise bringing innovative solutions and plenty of advantages which absolutely will change our life style and improve the global internet usage. The concept of “smart world” is being expanded little by little in lot of cities and regions. Smart world is related to Internet of Things (IoT) meaning a vast amount of sensors, wireless and wired devices ubiquitously interconnected by each other in order to deliver multiple services and information simultaneously (Arasteh et al., 2016; Zhu, Leung, Shu, & Ngai, 2015). In one click users can easily access to entertainment, financial, health, commercial or transportation applications by cellular phones, tablets, handhelds, laptops, smart vehicles and smart environments. Thus, deployment of smart cities supplies boundless features and services by evolving new business strategies and contributing economy productivity and urban sustainability and development (Li, Da Xu, & Zhao, 2015; Schaffers et al., 2011). The evolution of communication technologies promises ever-growing profits, the cloud computing, IoT, and C-ITS (Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System) or V2X (Vehicle-to-Anything) communications are considered to be integrated and significantly increase the traffic volume and usage intensity in the future (Arasteh et al., 2016).
C-ITS is focused to cope with the major transportation issues such as pollution, safety, car traffic management, etc. C-ITS applications and use-cases are designed to help drivers and pedestrians to prevent accidents, make them aware of road conditions and avoid traffic jams or certain natural phenomena, and in general to foster a greener, more convenient and sustainable transportation environment. These possibilities among others make IoT integrated V2X environments very promising, but to achieve all of these in practice it requires to solve complex security, privacy and management problems of cooperative communication between all players in the transportation ecosystem. C-ITS wireless communication is naturally prone of attacks, therefore the need to ensure a robust security framework is mandatory and it becomes the key element to its successful deployment (Wasef, Lu, Lin, & Shen, 2010). Due to the high node mobility it is expected that conditions and requirements will rapidly and continuously change, consequently software and hardware should be capable to support, detect and react to mitigate future threats and provide protection to privacy, sensitive information as well as maintaining the life cycle of the vehicles, IoT devices, etc., thus minimize the unauthorized access and facilitating the system recovery from incidents. However, the challenges for security, privacy, and interoperability for heterogeneous V2X networks, the security standard harmonization, the legacy and public politics are still in an infancy state (Schmittner, Ma, & Gruber, 2014).
Exchange information between vehicles is the main essence of C-ITS infrastructure, thus a mutual trust among the participating entities is essential, and each entity must provide all the mechanisms for secure and privacy-preserving communication in the ITS environment. For these purposes, different levels of certificates (long-term certificates, trust credentials, pseudonyms) are issued to each station for enrollment, authentication and privacy protection within the C-ITS infrastructure (Rasheed, Gillani, Ajmal, & Qayyum, 2017), all in a standardized way. The communication standards have been adopted according to the developed applications in different regions, e.g. in the US SAE1 J2735 Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC)(SAE, 2016) and IEEE2 1609 Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) standard families (1609.0-2013; 1609.1-2006; 1609.2-2016; 1609.3-2010; 1609.4-2006) are the main references, in Europe ETSI3 ITS G5 and CAN documents are considered as starting points (Lonc & Cincilla, 2016a), while ISO standards have global validity. A comprehensive analysis of these standards is depicted in later sections.