Human-Centered Approaches to Enhancing Cybersecurity Awareness in Autonomous Vehicle Operators

Abstract

There is a critical gap in research relating to the human factors of cybersecurity: within the context of AV operation, what impact do certain cybersecurity breaches, or classes of breaches, have on the operator’s task focus and decision-making processes? [1]. The national highway transportation safety administration (NHTSA) has identified several areas of “substantial barriers to deployment of highly-automated vehicles” including issues of trust and ethical implications, societal acceptance, data sharing, vehicle-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure. The security of the human factor in cybersecurity falls into the wider social issues surrounding human trust and automated vehicles. Necessary research may be categorized into psychological cyberattacks, which seek to model and understand the human factors contributing to attacks. Specific subcategories of these, that is, cyberterrorism and, more relevant to the present study, human factors in automobile surveillance, with a focus on the vehicle operator, who is the only person who can reasonably neutralize an attack.