The Disbanding Attack: Exploiting Human-in-the-Loop Control in Vehicular Platooning

Abstract

Due to advances in automated vehicle technology and inter-vehicle communication, vehicular platoons have attracted a growing interest by academia and industry alike, as they can produce safe driving, regularize traffic flow, and increase throughput. Research has demonstrated, however, that when platoons are placed in an adversarial environment, they are vulnerable to a variety of attacks that could negatively impact traffic flow and produce collisions and/or injuries. In this work, we consider an attack that seeks to exploit human-in-the-loop control of compromised vehicles that are part of a platoon. Specifically, we demonstrate that should a human operator need to suddenly take control of a platooned vehicle, significant upstream effects, which threaten the safety of passengers in other vehicles, may be induced. To counter this so-called disbanding attack, we present an optimal centralized mitigation approach. Due to scalability, security, and privacy concerns, such an approach may not be practical in reality. Hence, we also propose a decentralized mitigation algorithm that reduces excessive speed changes and coordinates inter-platoon behaviors to minimize the attack impacts. Our algorithm is compared to the aforementioned optimal approach and is shown to produce nearly equivalent results while requiring fewer resources. Experimental results on a hardware testbed show that our countermeasure permits graceful speed reductions and can provide safety, i.e., no collisions.