The U.S. DOT’s ITS Program advances research on ITS cyber interests and
works cooperatively with surface transportation agencies, including the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), FHWA, Federal Motor
Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), Federal Transit Administration
(FTA), United States Maritime Administration (MARAD), and others. This work
includes convening and facilitating the transportation ecosystem around
shared priorities, facilitating the development of related policies,
identifying and addressing cross-modal issues, and sharing best practices
and information while eliminating activities that may hinder cooperation
across teams.
The ITS Program also offers leadership, information, and resources to
state, local, and tribal agencies that cross modal boundaries and ensures
risk management across all of the transportation enterprise technology
components. State, local, and tribal agencies do not necessarily have
access to the type of expertise or the resources needed to pursue research
initiatives to improve their daily operational mission and cyber hygiene.
Further, needs that cross jurisdictional boundaries and apply nationally
can be efficiently addressed via ITS program leadership and coordination.
Research in Progress
The U.S. DOT has several research initiatives dedicated to ensuring a
secure, connected transportation environment:
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Cybersecurity Best Practices for Modern Vehicles
(2016) – Advanced driver assistance technologies depend on an array of
electronics, sensors, and computer systems. In advancing these features
and exploring the safety benefits of these new vehicle technologies,
NHTSA is focused on strong cybersecurity to ensure these systems work
as intended and are built to mitigate safety risks. View the report:
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Cybersecurity Best Practices for the Safety of Modern Vehicles
– Draft 2020 Update
– NHTSA’s draft 2020 Best Practices is intended to serve as a resource
for the industry and covers safety-related cybersecurity issues for all
motor vehicles and motor vehicle equipment. It is applicable to all
individuals and organizations involved in the design, manufacture, and
assembly of motor vehicles and their electronic systems and software.
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Infrastructure cybersecurity – Research efforts focus on strategies and
technology options to protect against threats and vulnerabilities to
our nation’s roadside equipment, devices, and systems.
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Development of a Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) for the ITS
ecosystem
–The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is voluntary guidance, based on
existing standards, guidelines, and practices for organizations to
better manage and reduce cybersecurity risk. The framework provides a
common language for understanding, managing, and expressing
cybersecurity risk to internal and external stakeholders. It can be
used to identify and prioritize actions for reducing cybersecurity
risk, and it is a tool for aligning policy, business, and technological
approaches to managing that risk. The framework core provides a set of
activities to achieve specific cybersecurity outcomes, and references
examples of guidance to achieve those outcomes. Building on the 2021
release of the Connected Vehicle CSF Profile, the U.S. DOT is
sponsoring expansion of this profile to include ITS infrastructure.
This research is focused on developing approaches, strategies, and
examples for state, local, and tribal DOTs and transportation operating
agencies on how to incorporate cybersecurity into their decision
making, and options for how to address cybersecurity issues for the ITS
ecosystem. When complete, the resulting ITS CSF profile will be posted
on this site on the Implementation Practices page.
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Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications security
– Ongoing research focuses on ensuring trusted communications between
vehicles, between infrastructure and vehicles, and evolving the current
security standards for over-the-air credentials in use with V2X. This
includes addressing transportation communication security requirements
for next‑generation communications capabilities for 5G NR (fifth
generation new radio cellular wireless), LTE vehicle-to-everything (LTE
V2X) technologies, and other emerging radio access technologies
relevant to ITS.
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Security Credential Management Systems (SCMS)
– Research efforts focus on misbehavior detection strategies to
identify malicious actors or malfunctioning devices. Additional efforts
concentrate on multi-vendor, multi-jurisdictional interoperable
implementations of credential management systems.
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Security in the National ITS Architecture Reference and ITS
Standards
– Ongoing collaboration between U.S. DOT, experts, standards working
groups, and transportation stakeholders to ensure the evolution of the
ITS architecture and ITS standards to ensure security is integrated
into the connected vehicle environment.
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Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Technology Readiness for
Safe Automated Driving Systems (ADS) Operations
and advancing this work through surveying and documenting candidate PNT
sensor technologies for ADS operations; and developing simulation and
analysis tools, including algorithm development for resiliency
enhancement under an unintentionally (e.g., cybersecurity spoofing
attacks) degraded environment.
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Cybersecurity Expands Into All Realms of Transportation
– An extensive list of Transportation Research Board (TRB) reports
focus on transportation and cybersecurity research. Includes links to
TRB committees cited in the research reports:
