Towards Safe and Secure Autonomous and Cooperative Vehicle Ecosystems

Semi-autonomous driver assists are already widely deployed and fully autonomous cars are progressively leaving the realm of laboratories. This evolution coexists with a progressive connectivity and cooperation, creating important safety and security challenges, the latter ranging from casual hackers to highly-skilled attackers, requiring a holistic analysis, under the perspective of fully-fledged ecosystems of autonomous and cooperative vehicles. This position paper attempts at contributing to a better understanding of the global threat plane and the specific threat vectors designers should be at- tentive to. We survey paradigms and mechanisms that may be used to overcome or at least mitigate the potential risks that may arise through the several threat vectors analyzed.