An investigation of APT attacks and countermeasures for edge-based VANET

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are among the most dangerous and sophisticated attacks against Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). Unlike traditional threats, APT attacks observe the target systems for a long period of time to fully comprehend the defensive mechanisms so they can bypass the sanity checks as well as all detection mechanisms. Once APTs penetrate the system and launch coordinated attacks, traffic safety is seriously threatened. Our research aims to explore potential attacks in a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET). The study covers Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication, and presents a simple APT-like collaborative attack. Through a simulation experiment, we present a collaborative scenario that an APT-like attack may occur in the future intelligent transportation system. This research will not only contribute to the current vehicular intrusion detection systems’ design from the safety aspects but will also be extended to the countermeasures studies in the future.