Symbiotic Analysis of Security Assessment and Penetration Tests Guiding Real L4 Automated City Shuttles

The Connected Automated Vehicle (CAV)’s deployment is proof of the wide evolution of autonomous driving technologies enabling vehicles to gradually dispose of their drivers. Within the scope of smart cities, such innovation has given rise to a new type of CAV: the Automated City Shuttle (ACS). Foreseen as the new paradigm aiming to shape the public transport model, the ACS elicits a plurality of new applications, such as the on-demand service in which a driverless shuttle offers the desired ride without human intervention. However, such a model raises cybersecurity concerns through the numerous attack surfaces and vehicle hyperconnection. This phenomenon was highlighted in several studies on CAVs, but very few research works tackled the specific case of ACSs, whose challenges and risks far exceed those of personal vehicles. The present work offers a comprehensive investigation of cybersecurity attacks, demonstrates a performed risk assessment based on the ISO/SAE 21434 standard, and showcases a penetration test over a real ACS of automation level four (L4) according to the Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE)’s ranking. Based on our experiments, we leverage fundamental cybersecurity recommendations with a focus on the ACS’s physical security.