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The entire concept of X2V and V2X is dead on arrival. Anything that requires a signal from a roadside device is just a complete non-starter. If your car takes behavior cues from some sensor network rather than the information presented to it by the scene it is in, then it is susceptible to trivial attack. I can sit on the roadside with a backpack and either jam the signal telling your car to stop, or I can send messages to all of the cars around me to tell them all to stop. I mean, just look at all of the nefarious stuff happening on the internet, and now think if you're willing to put your life in the hands of some network maintained by the lowest bidder?
Sorry but this is simply an unrealistic objection strategy, proposing hypothetical nefarious and technically sophisticated actors, dedicated to the sabotage of infrastructure that is actually much harder to disrupt than what exists today. The reason such a fantasy has a chance of scaring anyone away is the same reason that one can create FUD around any new technology, including EVs, AVs, air traffic control, cellular communications, the internet or you name it, past present and future - opacity of the technical details, an instinct to protect the familiar and natural human wariness of change (except, it seems, for poorly-conceived yet popular social/economic revolutions in the name of weaponized justice).
If you want to disrupt transportation infrastructure, to whatever diabolical and presumably profitable end, then there are
thousands of easier
and more frightening ways to do it, right now today, that don't involve
- waiting for development of a modern interconnected and BTW highly localized network,
- spoofing the protocol,
- breaking the ID encryption and substituting your own hashkey-correct and somehow untraceable fake ID,
- intercepting and somehow cancelling the legitimate network broadcast traffic,
- broadcasting your evil fake traffic that will be logged, localized, and recorded by the very cameras and sensors that are the intended spoof-targets,
- and most unreasonably, coordinating this evil hack-attack on a massive scale so as to accomplish more than an annoying tie-up at some interchange.
A properly-constituted V2X network infrastructure would be the very definition of robustness, fault tolerance and de-localized redundancy. Recent hacks in the news, you'll note, exploited central points of failure. The roots and trunks of distribution networks, not the twigs and leaves. A snot-nosed hacker or anarchist kid with a backpack and a Guy Fawkes mask isn't going to accomplish very much by fouling an intersection this way, and it'd quickly become apparent as a pretty stupid plan with high barrier of entry and low realizable gain. Kind of a self-solving problem really.
Just gaze out your window and think for a minute about all the damage that you or any other clever chap from this forum could do to your town's infrastructure and citizens, from pranking to mayhem to murder, if you put your mind to it. Civilization and its technology is always fragile in the micro but robust in the macro, and if it fails it's for much deeper flaws than technical sabotage.
And no I will not list examples or post videos of how to mess things up much easier, cheaper and scarier than your V2X network-hacking idea. (As I don't work for Consumer Reports
)
I really try hard to engage everyone here with a friendly, open-minded and constructive discussion of current reality and future (informed) predictive hypotheses. But I'll admit that this ill-considered "non-starter-dead-on-arrival" dismissal, of a very sensible though surely incomplete concept, really kind of frosted me. You could have
asked me how the network could be made resistant to pranking or sabotage; I think there are good answers but that would have required a lot of work or a disclaimer because it's not my field. Too late now.
Instead I'll throw it back to you, to justify why the V2X network would be more vulnerable and/or a juicier target than attacks on our communications, food-distribution, water supply or power grid.