A game-theoretic analysis of DoS attacks on driverless vehicles

Ryan Shah; Shishir Nagaraja

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arXiv · 1902.09590

A game-theoretic analysis of DoS attacks on driverless vehicles

Ryan Shah·Shishir Nagaraja

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Abstract

Driverless vehicles are expected to form the foundation of future connected transport infrastructure. A key weakness of connected vehicles is their vulnerability to physical-proximity attacks such as sensor saturation attacks. It is natural to study whether such attacks can be used to disrupt swarms of autonomous vehicles used as part of a large fleet providing taxi and courier delivery services. In this paper, we start to examine the strategic options available to attackers and defenders (autonomous-fleet operators) in such conflicts. We find that attackers have the upper hand in most cases and are able to carry out crippling denial-of-service attacks on fleets, by leveraging the inherent deficiencies of road networks identified by techniques from graph analysis. Experimental results on ten cities using real-world courier traces shows that most cities will require upgraded infrastructure to defend driverless vehicles against denial-of-service attacks. We found several hidden costs that impact equipment designers and operators of driverless vehicles - not least, that road-networks need to be redesigned for robustness against attacks thus raising some fundamental questions about the benefits.

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Ryan Shah, Shishir Nagaraja. 2019-02-25. A game-theoretic analysis of DoS attacks on driverless vehicles. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09590

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