A Survey of Security and Privacy Issues in V2X Communication Systems

Abstract: Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is receiving growing attention from industry and academia as multiple pilot projects explore its capabilities and feasibility. With about 50\% of global road vehicle exports coming from the European Union (EU), and within the context of EU legislation around security and data protection, V2X initiatives must consider security and privacy aspects across the system stack, in addition to road safety. Contrary to this principle, our survey of relevant standards, research outputs, and EU pilot projects indicates otherwise; we identify multiple security and privacy related shortcomings and inconsistencies across the standards. We conduct a root cause analysis of the reasons and difficulties associated with these gaps, and categorize the identified security and privacy issues relative to these root causes. As a result, our comprehensive analysis sheds lights on a number of areas that require improvements in the standards, which are not explicitly identified in related work. Our analysis fills gaps left by other related surveys, which are focused on specific technical areas but not necessarily point out underlying root issues in standard specifications. We bring forward recommendations to address these gaps for the overall improvement of security and safety in vehicular communication.