Cybersecurity of Autonomous Vehicle Platooning

Human mistakes are the main source of fatal accidents and daily traffic congestion. Recent researches have focused on assisting drivers to mitigate traffic fatalities and create more enjoyable drive experiences. Vehicle platooning or cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) has been stated as one of the most effective solutions to tackle this problem. Platooning concept involves a group of vehicles act as a single unit through coordination of movements. This concept draws a special attention among academia and governmental and non-governmental organizations. Recently, there have been several demonstrations, which have introduced the potential benefits of this idea, e.g. safety enhancement, increase roadway capacity, and improve traffic efficiency. While many aspects of platooning such as transportation impacts, mechanical and control concerns are still under investigation, very limited amount of work has studied platooning in an adversarial environment. To design safe distributed controllers and networks, it is essential to understand the possible attacks that can be applied against platoons. In this work, we design a set of insider attack and abnormal behaviors that are implemented in a car platoon. For example, an attack has been introduced, in which attacker exploits the platoon controller to cause collisions and disrupt the performance of platoon. In the small platoon, this successful attack can be carried through a malicious member of platoon solely by changing its motion (acceleration and deceleration) and gains of the controller. However, the attack should be executed through a collaborative effort in large platoons. In this case, the main attacker not only adjusts its gains and motion to accomplish the attack but also collaborates with the other attacker. Another attacker only uses the gain modification technique. The strong point of the proposed attack is that attacker stays intact while in existing works from literature, the attacker gets affected during an attack

Insider Vs. Outsider threats to autonomous vehicle platooning

Autonomous vehicles and platooning enhance productivity and present new opportunities and competitive advantages in the transportation industry. Platooning concept involves a group of vehicles acting as a single unit through coordination of movements. While Platooning as an evolving trend in mobility and transportation diminishes the individual and manual driving concerns, it creates new risks. New technologies and passengers’ safety and security further complicate matters and make platooning attractive target for the malicious minds. Threats and their potential impacts on vehicular platooning should be identified in order to protect the system against security risks. In this note, we show the range of the disruption that malicious insider and outsider can cause to the platoon. The insider attacker follows the normal control law of the platoon before it stArts the attack. This type of attack is implemented through control law modification, where the attacker maliciously misconfigures its controller. Outsider attacker is a non-platoon member who attempts to disrupt platoon. While the intruder can impact the other vehicles’ motions using its movement, it is not affected by other vehicles in the platoon. Outsider attack happens when attacker joins platoon deceitfully and tries to affect the platoon via its acceleration and deceleration. We demonstrate impacts of each attack on the platoon and discuss which type of attack poses the higher risks and results in the more catastrophic impacts

Analyzing Attacks on Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC)

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is one of the driving applications of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) and promises to bring more efficient and faster transportation through cooperative behavior between vehicles. In CACC, vehicles exchange information, which is relied on to partially automate driving; however, this reliance on cooperation requires resilience against attacks and other forms of misbehavior. In this paper, we propose a rigorous attacker model and an evaluation framework for this resilience by quantifying the attack impact, providing the necessary tools to compare controller resilience and attack effectiveness simultaneously. Although there are significant differences between the resilience of the three analyzed controllers, we show that each can be attacked effectively and easily through either jamming or data injection. Our results suggest a combination of misbehavior detection and resilient control algorithms with graceful degradation are necessary ingredients for secure and safe platoons.Comment: 8 pages (author version), 5 Figures, Accepted at 2017 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC

A survey on vehicular communication for cooperative truck platooning application

Platooning is an application where a group of vehicles move one after each other in close proximity, acting jointly as a single physical system. The scope of platooning is to improve safety, reduce fuel consumption, and increase road use efficiency. Even if conceived several decades ago as a concept, based on the new progress in automation and vehicular networking platooning has attracted particular attention in the latest years and is expected to become of common implementation in the next future, at least for trucks.The platoon system is the result of a combination of multiple disciplines, from transportation, to automation, to electronics, to telecommunications. In this survey, we consider the platooning, and more specifically the platooning of trucks, from the point of view of wireless communications. Wireless communications are indeed a key element, since they allow the information to propagate within the convoy with an almost negligible delay and really making all vehicles acting as one. Scope of this paper is to present a comprehensive survey on connected vehicles for the platooning application, starting with an overview of the projects that are driving the development of this technology, followed by a brief overview of the current and upcoming vehicular networking architecture and standards, by a review of the main open issues related to wireless communications applied to platooning, and a discussion of security threats and privacy concerns. The survey will conclude with a discussion of the main areas that we consider still open and that can drive future research directions.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Software Protection and Secure Authentication for Autonomous Vehicular Cloud Computing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing every technology we deal with. Autonomy has been a sought-after goal in vehicles, and now more than ever we are very close to that goal. Vehicles before were dumb mechanical devices, now they are becoming smart, computerized, and connected coined as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Moreover, researchers found a way to make more use of these enormous capabilities and introduced Autonomous Vehicles Cloud Computing (AVCC). In these platforms, vehicles can lend their unused resources and sensory data to join AVCC. In this dissertation, we investigate security and privacy issues in AVCC. As background, we built our vision of a layer-based approach to thoroughly study state-of-the-art literature in the realm of AVs. Particularly, we examined some cyber-attacks and compared their promising mitigation strategies from our perspective. Then, we focused on two security issues involving AVCC: software protection and authentication. For the first problem, our concern is protecting client’s programs executed on remote AVCC resources. Such a usage scenario is susceptible to information leakage and reverse-engineering. Hence, we proposed compiler-based obfuscation techniques. What distinguishes our techniques, is that they are generic and software-based and utilize the intermediate representation, hence, they are platform agnostic, hardware independent and support different high level programming languages. Our results demonstrate that the control-flow of obfuscated code versions are more complicated making it unintelligible for timing side-channels. For the second problem, we focus on protecting AVCC from unauthorized access or intrusions, which may cause misuse or service disruptions. Therefore, we propose a strong privacy-aware authentication technique for users accessing AVCC services or vehicle sharing their resources with the AVCC. Our technique modifies robust function encryption, which protects stakeholder’s confidentiality and withstands linkability and “known-ciphertexts” attacks. Thus, we utilize an authentication server to search and match encrypted data by performing dot product operations. Additionally, we developed another lightweight technique, based on KNN algorithm, to authenticate vehicles at computationally limited charging stations using its owner’s encrypted iris data. Our security and privacy analysis proved that our schemes achieved privacy-preservation goals. Our experimental results showed that our schemes have reasonable computation and communications overheads and efficiently scalable

Security of Vehicular Platooning

Platooning concept involves a group of vehicles acting as a single unit through coordination of movements. While Platooning as an evolving trend in mobility and transportation diminishes the individual and manual driving concerns, it creates new risks. New technologies and passenger’s safety and security further complicate matters and make platooning attractive target for the malicious minds. To improve the security of the vehicular platooning, threats and their potential impacts on vehicular platooning should be identified to protect the system against security risks. Furthermore, algorithms should be proposed to detect intrusions and mitigate the effects in case of attack. This dissertation introduces a new vulnerability in vehicular platooning from the control systems perspective and presents the detection and mitigation algorithms to protect vehicles and passengers in the event of the attack