Impacts of Constrained Sensing and Communication Based Attacks on Vehicular Platoons

Vehicular platooning promises to bring a faster, safer, and more efficient transportation. Automated platooned vehicles will rely on information obtained from inter-vehicle communication channels and on-board sensors to make driving decisions and achieve platooning. However, such reliance creates an opportunity for safety violating attacks intended to disrupt the platoon formation and cause accidents. In this work, we investigate more realistic attacks mounted against the communication and sensing functionalities of platooned vehicles. More specifically, we are interested in approximating the set of final unsafe states, that can be reached by mounting realistically constrained attacks capable of introducing delay and injecting false-data against the aforementioned functionalities. For that purpose, we will use reachability analysis which enables us to realize whether it is possible to drive the platoon from initial to final states given performance and physical bounds. Our results suggest that these two types of attack are able to steer the platoon towards dangerous states and generate impacts on passengers' safety by causing crashes at high speeds.