Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment for Connected Vehicles: A Survey

With the rapid development of connected vehicles, people can get a better driving experience. However, the interconnection with the external network may bring growing accidents caused by cybersecurity vulnerabilities. As a result, automakers are paying more attention to cybersecurity and spending more cost on developing cybersecurity defense mechanisms. Threat analysis and risk assessment (TARA) is an efficient method to ensure the defense effect and greatly save costs in the early stage of vehicle development. It analyzes the threat of vehicle systems and determines the hierarchical defense and corresponding mitigations according to the potential threat to the system. This paper gives an overview of threat analysis and risk assessment in the automotive field. First, a novel classification of different TARA methods has been proposed. The existing methods have been analyzed and compared. Then, we have found some commonly used tools applied to TARA and compared their performance. After that, a concept named attack-defense mapping is proposed to figure out how to map the already found threats and vulnerabilities of the system to the appropriate mitigations. At last, the future development directions of TARA in the automotive domain have been discussed.