Toward more secure and trustworthy transportation cyber-physical systems

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) and cyber infrastructure are key elements of the national infrastructure, and securing them is of critical importance to national security. There is ample evidence that these systems are vulnerable to disruption and damage due to natural disasters, social crises, and terrorism. CPS applications are becoming more widespread, ranging from healthcare with patient monitoring systems to autonomous vehicles to integrated electrical power grids. Within these various application domains, transportation cyber-physical systems (TCPS) have become a very important application of CPS, in which various sensing, computing, and control components, such as in-vehicle onboard sensors, traffic surveillance cameras, smartphones carried by pedestrians, and so on, are tightly coupled to enhance the safety and efficiency of the transportation system. There have been security and safety concerns for the deployment of TCPS, such as the Jeep hack in 2015 and Tesla accident in 2016, which clearly demonstrate the urgent need to secure TCPS better. This chapter discusses how to better safeguard TCPS by means of trust management. We first describe the basic concept of trust management, and summarize its application in generalized wireless networks. Then we discuss in detail how the trust management mechanism can benefit the TCPS in particular.