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1. On the Cybersecurity of Traffic Signal Control System With Connected Vehicles

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2022.3149449  

   Feng, Yiheng; Huang, Shihong; Wong, Wai; Chen, Qi Alfred; Mao, Z; Liu, Henry X. (January 2022, IEEE transactions on intelligent transportation systems)

   Connected vehicle (CV) technology brings both opportunities and challenges to the traffic signal control (TSC) system. While safety and mobility performance could be greatly improved by adopting CV technologies, the connectivity between vehicles and transportation infrastructure may increase the risks of cyber threats. In the past few years, studies related to cybersecurity on the TSC systems were conducted. However, there still lacks a systematic investigation that provides a comprehensive analysis framework. In this study, our aim is to fill the research gap by proposing a comprehensive analysis framework for the cybersecurity problem of the TSC in the CV environment. With potential threats towards the major components of the system and their corresponding impacts on safety and efficiency analyzed, data spoofing attack is considered the most plausible and realistic attack approach. Based on this finding, different attack strategies and defense solutions are discussed. A case study is presented to show the impact of the data spoofing attacks towards a selected CV based TSC system and corresponding mitigation countermeasures. This case study is conducted on a hybrid security testing platform, with virtual traffic and a real V2X communication network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to present a comprehensive analysis framework to the cybersecurity problem of the CV-based TSC systems. 

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2. Automated Discovery of Denial-of-Service Vulnerabilities in Connected Vehicle Protocols

   Hu, Shengtuo; Chen, Qi Alfred; Sun, Jiachen; Feng, Yiheng; Mao, Z. Morley; Liu, Henry X. (January 2021, USENIX Security Symposium)

   null (Ed.)

   With the development of the emerging Connected Vehicle (CV) technology, vehicles can wirelessly communicate with traffic infrastructure and other vehicles to exchange safety and mobility information in real time. However, the integrated communication capability inevitably increases the attack surface of vehicles, which can be exploited to cause safety hazard on the road. Thus, it is highly desirable to systematically understand design-level flaws in the current CV network stack as well as in CV applications, and the corresponding security/safety consequences so that these flaws can be proactively discovered and addressed before large-scale deployment. In this paper, we design CVAnalyzer, a system for discovering design-level flaws for availability violations of the CV network stack, as well as quantifying the corresponding security/safety consequences. To achieve this, CVAnalyzer combines the attack discovery capability of a general model checker and the quantitative threat assessment capability of a probabilistic model checker. Using CVAnalyzer, we successfully uncovered 4 new DoS (Denial-of-Service) vulnerabilities of the latest CV network protocols and 14 new DoS vulnerabilities of two CV platoon management protocols. Our quantification results show that these attacks can have as high as 99% success rates, and in the worst case can at least double the delay in packet processing, violating the latency requirement in CV communication.We implemented and validated all attacks in a real-world testbed, and also analyzed the fundamental causes to propose potential solutions. We have reported our findings in the CV network protocols to the IEEE 1609 Working Group, and the group has acknowledged the discovered vulnerabilities and plans to adopt our solutions. 

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3. GPS Spoofing Attack Detection on Intersection Movement Assist using One-Class Classification

   Ying, Jun; Feng, Yiheng; Chen, Qi Alfred; Mao, Z. (January 2023, ISOC Symposium on Vehicle Security and Privacy (VehicleSec))

   Intersection movement assist (IMA) is a connected vehicle (CV) application to improve vehicle safety. GPS spoofing attack is one major threat to the IMA application since inaccurate localization results may generate fake warnings that increase rear-end crashes, or cancel real warnings that may lead to angle or swipe crashes. In this work, we first develop a GPS spoofing attack model to trigger the IMA warning of entry vehicles at a roundabout driving scenario. The attack model can generate realistic trajectories while achieving the attack goal. To defend against such attacks, we further design a one-class classifier to distinguish the normal vehicle trajectories from the trajectories under attack. The proposed model is validated with a real-world data set collected from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Results show that although the attack model triggers the IMA warning in a short time (i.e., in a few seconds), the detection model can still identify the abnormal trajectories before the attack succeeds with low false positive and false negative rates. 

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4. A Requirements-Driven Platform for Validating Field Operations of Small Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles

   https://doi.org/10.1109/RE57278.2023.00013  

   Agrawal, Ankit; Zhang, Bohan; Shivalingaiah, Yashaswini; Vierhauser, Michael; Cleland-Huang, Jane (September 2023, IEEE)

   Flight-time failures of small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) can have a severe impact on people or the environment. Therefore, sUAS applications must be thoroughly evaluated and tested to ensure their adherence to specified requirements, and safe behavior under real-world conditions, such as poor weather, wireless interference, and satellite failure. However, current simulation environments for autonomous vehicles, including sUAS, provide limited support for validating their behavior in diverse environmental contexts and moreover, lack a test harness to facilitate structured testing based on system-level requirements. We address these shortcomings by eliciting and specifying requirements for an sUAS testing and simulation platform, and developing and deploying it. The constructed platform, DroneWorld (\DW), allows sUAS developers to define the operating context, configure multi-sUAS mission requirements, specify safety properties, and deploy their own custom sUAS applications in a high-fidelity 3D environment. The DroneWorld Monitoring system collects runtime data from sUAS and the environment, analyzes compliance with safety properties, and captures violations. We report on two case studies in which we used our platform prior to real-world sUAS deployments, in order to evaluate sUAS mission behavior in various environmental contexts. Furthermore, we conducted a study with developers and found that DroneWorld simplifies the process of specifying requirements-driven test scenarios and analyzing acceptance test results. 

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5. Detecting Data Spoofing in Connected Vehicle based Intelligent Traffic Signal Control using Infrastructure-Side Sensors and Traffic Invariants

   Shen, Junjie; Wan, Ziwen; Luo, Yunpeng; Feng, Yiheng; Mao, Z.; Chen, Qi Alfred (January 2023, IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV))

   Connected Vehicle (CV) technologies are under rapid deployment across the globe and will soon reshape our transportation systems, bringing benefits to mobility, safety, environment, etc. Meanwhile, such technologies also attract attention from cyberattacks. Recent work shows that CV-based Intelligent Traffic Signal Control Systems are vulnerable to data spoofing attacks, which can cause severe congestion effects in intersections. In this work, we explore a general detection strategy for infrastructure-side CV applications by estimating the trustworthiness of CVs based on readily-available infrastructureside sensors. We implement our detector for the CV-based traffic signal control and evaluate it against two representative congestion attacks. Our evaluation in the industrial-grade traffic simulator shows that the detector can detect attacks with at least 95% true positive rates while keeping false positive rate below 7% and is robust to sensor noises. 

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