Zulkernine, Mohammad (Queen’s University)

Purpose

A connected vehicle communicates with other vehicles, road infrastructure, Internet, Cloud, and mobile devices. The diversity of communication types and devices enable attackers to perform different types of attacks. These attacks may have major safety, security, privacy, and financial impacts on individuals and organizations. In this project, we will propose countermeasures for the attacks that could happen in connected vehicles based on a trust model that will consist of integrity, access control, availability, and privacy components. For each component, we will provide the required functions that should exist in vehicles, infrastructure, Cloud, and mobiles. Cloud will play a major role in the next generation of connected vehicles to provide useful information to a driver or a vehicle for making safer, faster, and more informed decisions. Based on the proposed trust model, we will achieve security services for a connected vehicle infrastructure through Cloud and defend against the communication attacks that could happen between connected vehicles and Cloud. The model will be implemented and evaluated following the best industrial practices and rigour, facilitated through our industrial partner. The research will be carried out by a multidisciplinary team led by experts in security engineering, computer networking, and software engineering from the industry partner and Queen's University. Our approach for securing connected vehicles will present Canada with a leading edge in combating fast changing cyber-attacks and in automating modern connected vehicles by training highly qualified software and network security engineers. The research program will facilitate a unique training environment for four PhD and eight MSc students.