Societal Perception of Security Threats in Vehicular Fog Computing : Critical Information Infrastructures, Winter Term 21/22

Background: With the increase of data generated by vehicles, currently employed ecosystems such as centralized cloud computing (CC) come to an end of their capabilities regarding, for example, real-time data processing and latency. Vehicular fog computing (VFC) is proposed as a potential solution to overcome this issue. However, the usage of VFC systems comes with security threats that may have lethal consequences. Literature has started to investigate these security threats from an expert point of view employing threat modeling techniques. Besides theoretical considerations, the adoption of novel technology is also influenced by potential users' perceptions of risks associated with it.Objective: This seminar paper sets out to answer the question of “How does society perceive security threats of VFC?” by providing a ranked list of security threats that VFC may come with.
Methods: To shed light on the perception of security risks in VFC, we build on the threat model proposed by Klein et al. (2022) and conduct a ranking-type Delphi study among non-domain experts (n=24). This three-phased approach enables the identification of novel security threats from a non-domain expert point of view, the selection of the security threats perceived as most important, and their ranking.
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Results: We present and discuss an ordered list of nine security threats that are perceived as most dangerous by the participants of the study. We also find that nearly all security threats and categories presented in the model of Klein et al. (2022) are also reported by our participants, except for the Repudiation category.
Conclusion: Our results indicate that privacy and safety-related security threats are considered the most dangerous. Although only reaching a low level of consensus (W=0.2322) in the ranking, participants are concerned about the privacy of their data that is collected, stored, and used for decision making in the VFC system and about threats that may result in system failure and potentially in harm to traffic participants. This work adds to the ongoing research on security threats in VFC by providing a non-expert point of view, which enables finding solutions to the security threats perceived as most dangerous to influence adoption positively.