Enhancing the evaluation of security in vehicular networks: featured trends and prospective work

In recent years, intra-vehicle and vehicle-to-everything communications have increasingly become major research topics. Indeed, vehicular networks are one of the main platforms contributing to significant improvements in automated driving, cooperative applications, and both road traffic optimisation and safety. Given the large amount and the critical nature of the information exchanged, security considerations are mandatory. However, among the numerous contributions of the literature regarding security in vehicular networks, it remains very difficult to compare the solutions, due to a great number of evaluation approaches and scenarios. In order to progress towards a more formalised and homogeneous framework for vehicular network security evaluation, this paper presents a survey of the most featured approaches and tools. This includes a review of the main validation methods used, the security and performance criteria evaluated, the thresholds these criteria must meet depending on the context, and the various vehicular network scenarios most commonly considered. The main findings of this paper show that evaluation practices in the literature are highly heterogeneous. Only a few works combine different evaluations approaches and tools, so that they can be easily compared to others. Moreover, the performance thresholds considered often vary from one work to another. These limitations underscore the urgent need for a standardised evaluation framework. Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches and tools, this paper also proposes a research agenda for enhancing the evaluation of security in vehicular networks.