End-to-End Co-Simulation Testbed for Cybersecurity Research and Development in Intelligent Transportation Systems

2025-09-19

AI Summary

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) face severe cybersecurity threats due to technological heterogeneity, while existing vulnerability assessment and defense validation approaches suffer from high cost and long development cycles. To address this, we present the first full-stack simulation testbed enabling closed-loop co-simulation across three domains: 3D driving environments (CARLA), microscopic traffic flow (SUMO), and V2X communication (OMNeT++), supporting end-to-end security evaluation from the physical to application layers. Our platform innovatively integrates post-quantum cryptography to strengthen the attack resilience of C-V2X-based active safety warning systems. Standardized middleware interfaces ensure high-fidelity, synchronized multi-engine execution, enabling accurate reproduction and validation of representative attack surfaces and countermeasures. This work significantly lowers the barrier to large-scale ITS security R&D and establishes a new paradigm for reproducible, scalable research in transportation cybersecurity.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Transportation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation

Abstract

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been widely deployed across major metropolitan regions worldwide to improve roadway safety, optimize traffic flow, and reduce environmental impacts. These systems integrate advanced sensors, communication networks, and data analytics to enable real-time traffic monitoring, adaptive signal control, and predictive maintenance. However, such integration significantly broadens the ITS attack surface, exposing critical infrastructures to cyber threats that jeopardize safety, data integrity, and operational resilience. Ensuring robust cybersecurity is therefore essential, yet comprehensive vulnerability assessments, threat modeling, and mitigation validations are often cost-prohibitive and time-intensive when applied to large-scale, heterogeneous transportation systems. Simulation platforms offer a cost-effective and repeatable means for cybersecurity evaluation, and the simulation platform should encompass the full range of ITS dimensions - mobility, sensing, networking, and applications. This chapter discusses an integrated co-simulation testbed that links CARLA for 3D environment and sensor modeling, SUMO for microscopic traffic simulation and control, and OMNeT++ for V2X communication simulation. The co-simulation testbed enables end-to-end experimentation, vulnerability identification, and mitigation benchmarking, providing practical insights for developing secure, efficient, and resilient ITS infrastructures. To illustrate its capabilities, the chapter incorporates a case study on a C-V2X proactive safety alert system enhanced with post-quantum cryptography, highlighting the role of the testbed in advancing secure and resilient ITS infrastructures.

Problem

• Developing a cost-effective testbed for cybersecurity evaluation in intelligent transportation systems
• Addressing the expanded attack surface from integrating sensors and communication networks in ITS
• Enabling comprehensive vulnerability assessments and mitigation validation for large-scale transportation systems

Innovation

• Integrated co-simulation testbed linking CARLA, SUMO, OMNeT++
• Enables end-to-end experimentation for vulnerability identification
• Case study with C-V2X system using post-quantum cryptography