Impact Sensitivity Analysis of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Against Resource-Limited Adversaries

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is a promising technology that allows groups of vehicles to form in automated tightly-coupled platoons. CACC schemes exploit Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) wireless communications to exchange kinematic information among adjacent vehicles. However, the use of communication networks brings security concerns as cyberattacks could access the vehicles' internal networks and computers to disrupt their operation and even cause crashes. In this manuscript, we present a sensitivity analysis of standard CACC schemes against a class of resource-limited attacks. We present a modelling framework that allows us to systematically compute outer ellipsoidal approximations of reachable sets induced by attacks. We use the size of these sets as a security metric to quantify the potential damage of attacks entering the dynamics at different points and study how two key system parameters (sampling and headway constant) change these metrics. We carry out the latter sensitivity analysis for two different controller implementations (as given the available sensors there is an infinite number of realizations of the same controller) and show how different implementations can significantly affect the impact of attacks. We present extensive simulation experiments to illustrate our ideas.