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

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

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

How to Create the Most Destructive Attack on Vehicle Formation: Comprehensive Analysis of the Position of the Attacker

Identifying the best position of the attacker is the challenging problem in realizing secure vehicular formation. Based on our mathematical analysis we present the efficacy of the attack for the different places of the attacker. This technique would suggest the most impactful place of the attacker in the formation. In the end, We present the numerical results that demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed analysis

Collaborative attacks on vehicular platooning

Vehicle platooning is defined as multiple vehicles driving in a string and maintaining a pre-specified distance to each other. Vehicular platoon implementation results in improvement of safety via eliminating chances of human errors, increase in highway capacity by maintaining small spacings, and enhancement of driving comfort and efficiency. While platooning deployment might be of interest to many organizations and individuals due to its undeniable advantages, the safety of the vehicle passengers can be at risk by one(multiple) attacker(s). Hence, we should take into consideration potential security risks to platooning. In this brief, we describe how multiple attackers can create catastrophic impacts on the platoon in collaboration with each other. In literature, there are instances of attacks that attackers act independently. They alter the control configuration solely based on their prior knowledge of the platooning configuration and not relying on other attacker’s information. We propose a systematic method that illustrates how two attackers can change their control configuration in tandem with each other in order to create a successful attack. In our proposed scheme, one attacker modifies its controller setup following the changes the other attacker initiated. Finally, we demonstrate the impact of the designed collaborative attack on the vehicular platoon