Towards secure intra-vehicle communications in 5G advanced and beyond: Vulnerabilities, attacks and countermeasures

Intelligent Connected Vehicle (ICV), as the product of the deep integration of automobile, electronics, information, and artificial intelligence in the era of 5G advanced and beyond, has become the pursuit of the automotive industry. To improve ICV security, traditional methods, such as in-vehicle gateway firewall, encryption, and authentication, become the potential choice to protect the communication between vehicles and the outside world. However, traditional methods cannot be directly applied to ICV due to the extremely limited computing and storage resources of intra-vehicle communication and the high real-time requirements of the packets transmitted in the vehicle. Therefore, there is an urgent need for lightweight and real-time solutions for intra-vehicle communication security. In addition, it should be noted that no matter where an attack is launched, the attacker must control the corresponding Electronic Control Unit (ECU) through intra-vehicle communication if he wants to control the ICV's behavior. Therefore, intra-vehicle communications can be regarded as the last line of defense for ICV security. With this in mind, we conduct a comprehensive and new technical investigation about the security issues of the intra-vehicle communications around the pioneering work on the vulnerabilities, attacks, and countermeasures. In addition, we investigate the activities and contributions of standardization organizations and highlight the new challenges for intra-vehicle communication security. Finally, we present some discussions on next-generation intra-vehicle communication technologies and new solutions to protect intra-vehicle communications in the future.