Security threats from connecting mobile phones to connected vehicles

Technical innovations and constantly expanding role of software has made modern cars more like computers than ever before. Software has introduced new features to cars. With the addition of new features, also new sensors have been added as well. Together with connecting user accounts and devices to the vehicle, vehicles have started to gather more and more information on their users. New connective technology has made cars more connected than ever. The large amounts of information that cars now collect can be accessed from all over the globe with the use of internet. It should now be carefully determined whether safety and security measures have kept pace with the influx of these new changes. This research was done as a literary review. Relevant material was collected by using search engines Google, Google Scholar and Scopus. IEEE Explore and Web of Science were used for searching for papers as well as for downloading them. ResearchGate was used for downloading the papers as well. Papers were also chosen by finding relevant papers from already chosen papers’ list of references. Papers were selected based on their relevance to the topic. Papers that were on the topic of vehicle information or electronic security or specifically about vehicle security regarding connections with mobile phones or other connective technology were selected. Cars were originally designed to be closed systems. There are technical weaknesses stemming from this original design idea, that now create holes in the security of connected vehicles. This research divided these threat categories to three parts. The first category is phones themselves. The second one is the threats that come from the main connection between phones and cars which is Bluetooth. The third category is the OBD-II port. Risks from phones come from the relatively fast product cycle they have. Malware also should be taken into consideration. Bluetooth risks come from pairing issues and discoverability, and there are several types of Bluetooth attacks that should ...