The need for active safety, highway guidance, telematics, traffic management, cooperative driving, driver convenience and automatic toll payment will require future intelligent vehicles to communicate with other vehicles as well as with the road-side infrastructure. However, inter-vehicle and vehicle to roadside infrastructure communications will impose some security threats against vehicles' safety and their proprietary information. To avoid collisions, a vehicle should receive messages only from other authentic vehicles. The internal buses and electronics of a vehicle must also be protected from intruders and other people with malicious intents. Otherwise, a person can inject incorrect messages into an authentic vehicle's internal communication system and then make the vehicle transmit wrong information to the other vehicles within the vicinity. Such an event may have catastrophic consequences. Thus, a detailed study of the security needs of the future vehicles is very important.
In this paper, we will present the results of a comprehensive study related to various types of security threats against a vehicle's electronic communication system. The paper will identify various types of security attacks against a vehicle's electronic system. The paper will also address various issues that are related to the design of secure microcontrollers, secure electronic modules, secure communications through the vehicle's internal buses and privacy-protected secure peer-to- peer communications.