Cybersecurity Challenges of Autonomous Systems

With the recent dramatic increase in performance of artificial intelligence and related computing systems, together with advanced sensing, connectivity, and technological platforms, autonomous systems are poised to enter many application domains such as transportation and manufacturing. As autonomy increases, the risks of cybersecurity threats are equally rising, requiring the development of sophisticated methods on all layers of autonomous systems architectures. Therefore, this paper systematically introduces cybersecurity challenges ranging from the physical layer to the system of systems layer defining the collaboration of autonomous systems. Without loss of generality, autonomous vehicles are used to highlight current developments, illustrating which efforts are necessary to achieve secure and safe autonomous systems. Our discussions are comprehensively highlighting which research domains require further investigation and offer promising opportunities to contribute to mitigating cybersecurity challenges of autonomous systems.