1. Project Title/ Job position title: Secure cloud-based services to support cooperative autonomous driving functions

2. Area of knowledge: Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering Panel

3. Group of disciplines: Theoretical and Applied Mathematics, Computer Sciences and IT

4. Research project/ Research Group description:
Autonomous and intelligent driving systems are emerging technologies whose development still presents many challenges to meet the needed safety requirements, especially without compromising utility.
In LASIGE and in the context of its research line in Cyber-Physical Systems, we have been exploiting Vehicular-to-Vehicular (V2V) and Vehicular-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications as an approach to enrich the perception of autonomous vehicles and to perform safe maneuvering in a cooperative way. Vehicular cooperation does not replace autonomous functions but creates opportunities to perform these functions in a more efficient way. V2V communication is used to execute fault tolerant agreement protocols, while V2I communication provides the basis for exploiting cloud-based resources and services to improve perception and support cooperation. For instance, a membership service is essential in the execution of an agreement protocol, as it provides knowledge on the relevant vehicles that must be involved in the protocol execution. These services, besides being fault-tolerant and scalable, must also be secure and trustworthy.
In this work proposal, the objective is to address security requirements on the exchange of V2V and V2I information and on the design and development of cloud-based services to support vehicular cooperation. The solutions to be designed and developed must prevent or mitigate the effects of malicious attacks aimed at compromising these services, information exchange and, ultimately, vehicular safety. The work will require the design, development and evaluation of system solutions, architectures, mechanisms and protocols aimed to support effective, safe and secure cooperation between autonomous vehicles.

5. Job position description:
The student will be involved in the various tasks required for developing the needed solutions, from design to implementation and validation. The first step in the work will be to model the target system with respect to the actors to be considered (e.g., vehicles, road-side units, infrastructure servers, etc.), the relevant interactions between them, the considered attacks vectors and their translation into possible faults, and other aspects of the system like synchrony or resource availability. Relevant abstractions must also be defined, as needed to simplify the problem without loosing generality. Then, the set of services supported by V2I communication that will have to be secured must be defined. Besides membership, which is necessary for cooperation, other services may also be relevant in the context of automated driving, like road and traffic information services, software update services, etc. Depending on the considered services, a set of relevant interaction models and associated functional requirements will have to be identified. Then, the challenge will be to design the solutions (including architecture and protocols) to not only address these functional requirements, but to ensure that security requirements are satisfied in the presence of the considered attacks. Besides typical solutions for authentication and enforcement of secure communication, intrusion tolerance techniques will have to be explored on the server side, investigating and finding appropriate tradeoffs between protocol complexity, scalability and achievable security. The work will also involve the implementation and validation of the developed solutions, for instance deploying them in public clouds and using available V2I technologies (if possible, the goal is to use 5G for network access).
The project is developed with members of the Navigators group of the LASIGE research lab and is aligned with the objectives of the H2020 project Admorph.

6. Group leader:
* title: Professors
* full name: António Casimiro and Bernardo Ferreira
* email: casim@ciencias.ulisboa.pt and blferreira@fc.ul.pt
* research project/ research group website: http://navigators.di.fc.ul.pt
* website description: the site belongs to one of the groups of the LASIGE Lab (lasige.pt)