Determining the Interruption of Services While Performing V2I Communication Using the SPMD Prototype

The use of Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I), Vehicle to Roadside Unit (V2R) and Vehicle to Other (V2X) communications are increasingly applied over existing and upcoming transportation means by the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) and other federal agencies. From previous statistical data, these technologies would primarily avoid or mitigate vehicle crashes and would provide more safety, mobility and various other benefits on the roads (“Traffic Safety Facts 2012,” 2013; “Traffic Safety Facts 2013” 2014). During the communication processes between vehicles, infrastructures and roadside units’ various sensitive data such as positions and speed of the vehicles, are transmitted which are currently highly vulnerable. These facts are generated from this research experiment results performed on the provided data sets from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). An interference to the vehicular communications is possible by intentional or unintentional malicious users or other elements which puts drivers at greater risk with the upcoming vehicular technology. Moreover, different agencies and private companies are utilizing collected data from the USDOT to improve the operational volume of roads and services while avoiding accidents. They are also trying to provide other third-party Internet-based services to the consumers based on the live streaming information. This research paper gives a detailed description of all aspects of the vehicular communications protocol (i.e. DSRC, CA, 802.11p protocol, smart infrastructure, etc.). This research paper will provide details of all identified security features (i.e. encryption methods, certificate management, physical securities, data management lifecycles, etc.) that have been applied to these mechanisms to protect the safety of drivers (Cronin, 2013). The USDOT has currently approved the implementation of a 5.9 GHz band, along with the 802.11p standard wireless protocol for dedicated short-range communications used in vehicular communication (Shankland, 2014). This research paper will also provide details of current standards and regulations which will be in effect for the upcoming vehicular technologies in the future in the US along with the susceptibilities to the interruptions of services. Finally, this research will utilize the actual data sets compiled using the actual safety pilot model deployment (SPMD) provided by the UMRTI researchers. The analysis of these results will validate that this protocol is susceptible to interference during communications. This will be shown by plotting the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates and thus demonstrating the occurrence of gaps within communication (i.e. interference to the vehicular communication) in the existing SPMD prototype data sets

A Structured Approach to Securing the Connected Car

<p>Vehicles of today have become increasingly dependent on software to handle their functionalities. Updating and maintaining the software in vehicles has therefore become a costly process for the automotive industry. By introducing wireless communications to vehicles, vehicular maintenance can greatly be improved and many other new applications can also be brought to the vehicles. However, the vehicle was not designed with security in mind. Since the vehicle is safety-critical, it is vital that such new remote services do not violate the safety and security requirements of the vehicle. Thus, this thesis presents a general approach to securing the connected car and the usefulness of the approach is demonstrated in a vehicular diagnostics scenario.</p> <p>The thesis comes in two main parts. In the first part, we address security mechanisms for the connected car. First, a survey of current mechanisms to secure the in-vehicle networks is made. Then, a description of possible communication methods with vehicles is given and a taxonomy of current entities involved in such communication is presented. The taxonomy is organised in actors, vehicle-to-X communications, network paths, and dependability and security attributes. The usefulness of the taxonomy is demonstrated by two examples.</p> <p>In the second part, we address security with respect to vehicular diagnostics. First, an overall security analysis of the interaction between the connected car and the repair shop is conducted. We find that the most imminent risk in the repair shop is the loss of authentication keys. The loss of such keys allows masquerading attacks against vehicles. To address this problem, we propose a Kerberos-inspired protocol for authentication and authorisation of the diagnostics equipment and a trusted third party is introduced.</p> <p>To conclude, this thesis shows the value of adopting a structured approach to securing the connected car. The approach has been shown to be useful for identifying threats and countermeasures and thus help improving security.</p

Infrastructure Enabled Autonomy Acting as an Intelligent Transportation System for Autonomous Cars

Autonomous cars have the ability to increase safety, efficiency, and speed of travel. Yet many see a point at which stand-alone autonomous agents populate an area too densely, creating increased risk - particularly when each agent is operating and making decisions on its own and in its own self-interest. The problem at hand then becomes how to best implement and scale this new technology and structure in such a way that it can keep pace with a rapidly changing world, benefitting not just individuals, but societies. This research approaches the challenge by developing an intelligent transportation system that relies on an infrastructure. The solution lies in the removal of sensing and high computational tasks from the vehicles, allowing static ground stations with multi sensor-sensing packs to sense the surrounding environment and direct the vehicles safely from start to goal. On a high level, the Infrastructure Enabled Autonomy system (IEA) uses less hardware, bandwidth, energy, and money to maintain a controlled environment for a vehicle to operate when in highly congested environments. Through the development of background detection algorithms, this research has shown the advantage of static MSSPs analyzing the same environment over time, and carrying an increased reliability from fewer unknowns about the area of interest. It was determined through testing that wireless commands can sufficiently operate a vehicle in a limited agent environment, and do not bottleneck the system. The horizontal trial outcome illustrated that a switching MSSP state of the IEA system showed similar loop time, but a greatly increased standard deviation. However, after performing a t-test with a 95 percent confidence interval, the static and switching MSSP state trials were not significantly different. The final testing quantified the cross track error. For a straight path, the vehicle being controlled by the IEA system had a cross track error less than 12 centimeters, meaning between the controller, network lag, and pixel error, the system was robust enough to generate stable control of the vehicle with minimal error

FRIEND: A Cyber-Physical System for Traffic Flow Related Information Aggregation and Dissemination

The major contribution of this thesis is to lay the theoretical foundations of FRIEND — A cyber-physical system for traffic Flow-Related Information aggrEgatioN and Dissemination. By integrating resources and capabilities at the nexus between the cyber and physical worlds, FRIEND will contribute to aggregating traffic flow data collected by the huge fleet of vehicles on our roads into a comprehensive, near real-time synopsis of traffic flow conditions. We anticipate providing drivers with a meaningful, color-coded, at-a-glance view of flow conditions ahead, alerting them to congested traffic. FRIEND can be used to provide accurate information about traffic flow and can be used to propagate this information. The workhorse of FRIEND is the ubiquitous lane delimiters (a.k.a. cat\u27s eyes) on our roadways that, at the moment, are used simply as dumb reflectors. Our main vision is that by endowing cat\u27s eyes with a modest power source, detection and communication capabilities they will play an important role in collecting, aggregating and disseminating traffic flow conditions to the driving public. We envision the cat\u27s eyes system to be supplemented by road-side units (RSU) deployed at regular intervals (e.g. every kilometer or so). The RSUs placed on opposite sides of the roadway constitute a logical unit and are connected by optical fiber under the median. Unlike inductive loop detectors, adjacent RSUs along the roadway are not connected with each other, thus avoiding the huge cost of optical fiber. Each RSU contains a GPS device (for time synchronization), an active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag for communication with passing cars, a radio transceiver for RSU to RSU communication and a laptop-class computing device. The physical components of FRIEND collect traffic flow-related data from passing vehicles. The collected data is used by FRIEND\u27s inference engine to build beliefs about the state of the traffic, to detect traffic trends, and to disseminate relevant traffic flow-related information along the roadway. The second contribution of this thesis is the development of an incident classification and detection algorithm that can be used to classify different types of traffic incident Then, it can notify the necessary target of the incident. We also compare our incident detection technique with other VANET techniques. Our third contribution is a novel strategy for information dissemination on highways. First, we aim to prevent secondary accidents. Second, we notify drivers far away from the accident of an expected delay that gives them the option to continue or exit before reaching the incident location. A new mechanism tracks the source of the incident while notifying drivers away from the accident. The more time the incident stays, the further the information needs to be propagated. Furthermore, the denser the traffic, the faster it will backup. In high density highways, an incident may form a backup of vehicles faster than low density highways. In order to satisfy this point, we need to propagate information as a function of density and time

A Framework for Incident Detection and notification in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

The US Department of Transportation (US-DOT) estimates that over half of all congestion events are caused by highway incidents rather than by rush-hour traffic in big cities. The US-DOT also notes that in a single year, congested highways due to traffic incidents cost over $75 billion in lost worker productivity and over 8.4 billion gallons of fuel. Further, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) indicates that congested roads are one of the leading causes of traffic accidents, and in 2005 an average of 119 persons died each day in motor vehicle accidents. Recently, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) employing a combination of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) wireless communication have been proposed to alert drivers to traffic events including accidents, lane closures, slowdowns, and other traffic-safety issues. In this thesis, we propose a novel framework for incident detection and notification dissemination in VANETs. This framework consists of three main components: a system architecture, a traffic incident detection engine and a notification dissemination mechanism. The basic idea of our framework is to collect and aggregate traffic-related data from passing cars and to use the aggregated information to detect traffic anomalies. Finally, the suitably filtered aggregated information is disseminated to alert drivers about traffic delays and incidents. The first contribution of this thesis is an architecture for the notification of traffic incidents, NOTICE for short. In NOTICE, sensor belts are embedded in the road at regular intervals, every mile or so. Each belt consists of a collection of pressure sensors, a simple aggregation and fusion engine, and a few small transceivers. The pressure sensors in each belt allow every message to be associated with a physical vehicle passing over that belt. Thus, no one vehicle can pretend to be multiple vehicles and then, is no need for an ID to be assigned to vehicles. Vehicles in NOTICE are fitted with a tamper-resistant Event Data Recorder (EDR), very much like the well-known black-boxes onboard commercial aircraft. EDRs are responsible for storing vehicles behavior between belts such as acceleration, deceleration and lane changes. Importantly, drivers can provide input to the EDR, using a simple menu, either through a dashboard console or through verbal input. The second contribution of this thesis is to develop incident detection techniques that use the information provided by cars in detecting possible incidents and traffic anomalies using intelligent inference techniques. For this purpose, we developed deterministic and probabilistic techniques to detect both blocking incidents, accidents for examples, as well as non-blocking ones such as potholes. To the best of our knowledge, our probabilistic technique is the first VANET based automatic incident detection technique that is capable of detecting both blocking and non blocking incidents. Our third contribution is to provide an analysis for vehicular traffic proving that VANETs tend to be disconnected in many highway scenarios, consisting of a collection of disjoint clusters. We also provide an analytical way to compute the expected cluster size and we show that clusters are quite stable over time. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first in the VANET community to prove analytically that disconnection is the norm rather than the exceptions in VANETs. Our fourth contribution is to develop data dissemination techniques specifically adapted to VANETs. With VANETs disconnection in mind, we developed data dissemination approaches that efficiently propagate messages between cars and belts on the road. We proposed two data dissemination techniques, one for divided roads and another one for undivided roads. We also proposed a probabilistic technique used by belts to determine how far should an incident notification be sent to alert approaching drivers. Our fifth contribution is to propose a security technique to avoid possible attacks from malicious drivers as well as preserving driver\u27s privacy in data dissemination and notification delivery in NOTICE. We also proposed a belt clustering scheme to reduce the probability of having a black-hole in the message dissemination while reducing also the operational burden if a belt is compromised