End-to-End Co-Simulation Testbed for Cybersecurity Research and Development in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been widely deployed across major metropolitan regions worldwide to improve roadway safety, optimize traffic flow, and reduce environmental impacts. These systems integrate advanced sensors, communication networks, and data analytics to enable real-time traffic monitoring, adaptive signal control, and predictive maintenance. However, such integration significantly broadens the ITS attack surface, exposing critical infrastructures to cyber threats that jeopardize safety, data integrity, and operational resilience. Ensuring robust cybersecurity is therefore essential, yet comprehensive vulnerability assessments, threat modeling, and mitigation validations are often cost-prohibitive and time-intensive when applied to large-scale, heterogeneous transportation systems. Simulation platforms offer a cost-effective and repeatable means for cybersecurity evaluation, and the simulation platform should encompass the full range of ITS dimensions - mobility, sensing, networking, and applications. This chapter discusses an integrated co-simulation testbed that links CARLA for 3D environment and sensor modeling, SUMO for microscopic traffic simulation and control, and OMNeT++ for V2X communication simulation. The co-simulation testbed enables end-to-end experimentation, vulnerability identification, and mitigation benchmarking, providing practical insights for developing secure, efficient, and resilient ITS infrastructures. To illustrate its capabilities, the chapter incorporates a case study on a C-V2X proactive safety alert system enhanced with post-quantum cryptography, highlighting the role of the testbed in advancing secure and resilient ITS infrastructures.