A Scoping Study: Crime and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) integrate advanced communication and autonomous driving technologies, enabling them to operate independently or with minimal human intervention. The anticipated benefits of CAVs are numerous and include making transportation accessible to all, reducing accidents due to human error, optimising traffic flow, and creating new industries and job opportunities. Autonomous driving capabilities in CAVs rely on advanced sensor technology and AI-driven analytics, which process data from multiple sensors to navigate, perceive the surrounding environment, detect obstacles, and make driving decisions in real-time. Despite the many benefits, CAVs will be highly vulnerable to a wide variety of crimes unless security measures are implemented by design. To understand the potential threats, this study introduces the enabling technology and reference architecture for CAVs and reports the findings from an extensive scoping review of the available literature. This covers reported crime incidents, academic literature on potential threats, a survey of academic survey papers on CAV security, and a review of papers concerned with cyberattacks against CAVs published in the past five years. The findings from the review are complemented by the findings from a workshop with experts about which of the identified threats should be prioritised for the purposes of crime reduction. The findings indicate that a wide range of cyber-attacks and offences are possible, and that the threat landscape is continually expanding due to insufficient attention being given to security during the development of the technology. Suggestions for policy and priorities for future work are suggested.