Modern vehicular wireless technology enables vehicles to exchange information at any time, from any place, to any network -forms the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication platforms. Despite benefits, V2X applications also face great challenges to security and privacy -a very valid concern since breaches are not uncommon in automotive communication networks and applications. In this survey, we provide an extensive overview of V2X ecosystem. We also review main security/privacy issues, current standardization activities and existing defense mechanisms proposed within the V2X domain. We then identified semantic gaps of existing security solutions and outline possible open issues.We also discuss possible open issues (Section VIII), summarize multiple industry/academic/government initiatives for securing V2X communications (Section IX-A) and compare our work with related surveys (Section IX-B).
II. V2X PLATFORM : AN OVERVIEWThis section provides an overview of V2X communication interfaces (Section II-A) and discuss various network/communication models (Section II-B).
A. Communication InterfacesThe internal architecture of a vehicle is interconnected with ECUs (electronic control units -embedded computing platform that monitor/control automotive systems) coupled with sensors and actuators. The communication between the vehicle and the outside world such as other vehicles or roadside units (RSUs) is performed via external interfaces (see Fig. 1). These vehicular external interfaces are attached to the telematics control unit (TCU) -also referred to as on-board unit (OBU) 1 -an ECU that provides wireless connectivity [7], [8]. A vehicle control unit coordinates with the OBU to collect and disseminate vehicular data [9]. The current standards for V2X communication are DSRC (dedicated short range communication) [10] in the United States, C-ITS (cooperative intelligent transport systems) [11] in Europe and ITS Connect [12] in Japan. Both DSRC and C-ITS operating in the 5.9 GHz ITS band while ITS Connect operating in 760 MHz band (refer to Section II-B1 for details). An alternative to DSRC/C-ITS is the next generation of cellular wireless mobile telecommunications technology (see Section II-B2). OBUs can also be equipped with interfaces for long-range communication. These long-range wireless channels can be classified as broadcast channels (signals can be broadcast to multiple vehicles without knowledge of the receiver's address) and addressable channels (where messages are sent to vehicles with specific addresses.) [13]. Examples of broadcast channels include the global navigation satellite system (GNSS), traffic message/satellite radio receivers, etc. Addressable channels are typically used for long-range voice/data transmissions and are intended to be used for cellular communications for mobile broadband [8].