Security of intelligent transportation systems

Project Title:

Security of intelligent transportation systems

Supervisors:

Alireza Jolfaei, Joarder Kamruzzaman, Gour Karmakar

Contact person and email address:

Alireza Jolfaei a.jolfaei@federation.edu.au

A brief description of the project:

Autonomous vehicular technology is approaching a level of maturity that gives confidence to many cities around the world to allow autonomous vehicles (AVs) to share the roads with manual vehicles (MVs). AVs and MVs have different capabilities, which may result in surprising safety, security and resilience impacts when mixed together as a part of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). For example, AVs are able to communicate electronically with one another, make fast decisions and associated actuation, and generally act deterministically. In contrast, MVs cannot communicate electronically, are limited by the capabilities and slow reaction of human drivers, and may show some uncertainty and even irrationality in behaviour due to the involvement of human. At the same time, humans can react properly to more complex situations than AVs.

Unlike MVs, the security of computing and communications of AVs can be compromised thereby precluding them from achieving individual or group goals. The purpose of this project is to analyse and understand how both types of vehicles will fare in terms of safety, performance, and resilience under a variety of situations without and with attacks on the AV communications. In contrast to existing research on cyber-attacks on the functions of individual vehicles (AV or MV), this project specifically focuses on the interplay of different types of vehicles (AV vs. MV) under the influence of a cyber-adversary.