Thesis topic:

Practical penetration testing methodology for Intelligent Transportation Systems

  • Supervisor: Abasi-Amefon Obot Affia
    • contact: amefon.affia@ut.ee
  • Today, there are more connected components of vehicular intelligent transportation systems (ITS), resulting in an increased potential for malicious attacks that can negatively impact security and safety. Thus, timely detection and patching of these vulnerabilities can avoid future attacks. Penetration testing helps to identify such vulnerabilities, facilitates patch management and remediation procedures, and contributes to practical risk assessment and management.
  • The increasing amount of IoT devices and applications and their cooperative behavior to achieve intelligent transportation introduce challenges to the scalability of traditional penetration testing. The heterogeneity of these devices increases costs and the complexity of coordination of testing due to the number of variables.
  • The goal of this study is to provide a method that specifically caters to the systematic testing of ITS components and considers assets in its perception, network, and application layers. The methodology should be easily scalable to large and complex ITS.
  • Note: This topic can be adapted specifically for autonomous/connected vehicle systems and can be tested with the help of the Autonomous Vehicle Lab.
  • References
    • 1. Affia, A. O., Matulevičius, R., & Nolte, A. (2019, October). Security risk management in cooperative intelligent transportation systems: a systematic literature review. In OTM Confederated International Conferences" On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems" (pp. 282-300). Springer, Cham.
    • 2. Kim, H., Ahmad, A., Hwang, J., Baqa, H., Le Gall, F., Ortega, M. A. R., & Song, J. (2018). IoT-TaaS: Towards a prospective IoT testing framework. IEEE Access, 6, 15480-15493.

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