Security vulnerabilities of autonomous platoons

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that autonomous vehicles have the potential of fundamentally changing the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and substantially affecting the safety in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control System (CACC) in conjunction with vehicular communication paves the way of vehicle platooning where autonomous vehicles are organized into groups with close proximity. From this perspective, platoon management using the current dominant IEEE 802.11p (DSRC) and hybrid DSRC-Visible Light Communication (VLC) is an active research field to ensure the platoon stability. However, before the practical deployment of vehicular platoons, the DSRC and hybrid DSRC-VLC based management protocols need to be analyzed in the presence of attackers. In this paper, we investigate the security vulnerabilities of DSRC and DSRC-VLC based platoons under the jamming and fake platoon maneuver attacks. We demonstrate that DSRC is highly vulnerable to such attacks. Although VLC limits the effect of adversaries, hybrid architecture still suffers from the jamming and fake maneuver attacks.