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1. Vehicle lateral motion stability under wheel lockup attacks

   Mohammadi, Alirezal ; Malik, Hafiz ( April 2022 , In the Fourth International Workshop on Automotive and Autonomous Vehicle Security (AutoSec@NDSS’22))

   Motivated by ample evidence in the automotive cybersecurity literature that the car brake ECUs can be maliciously reprogrammed, it has been shown that an adversary who can directly control the frictional brake actuators can induce wheel lockup conditions despite having a limited knowledge of the tire-road interaction characteristics~\cite{mohammadi2021acc}. In this paper, we investigate the destabilizing effect of such wheel lockup attacks on the lateral motion stability of vehicles from a robust stability perspective. Furthermore, we propose a quadratic programming (QP) problem that the adversary can solve for finding the optimal destabilizing longitudinal slip reference values. 

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2. Generation of Wheel Lockup Attacks on Nonlinear Dynamics of Vehicle Traction

   https://doi.org/10.23919/ACC53348.2022.9867828  

   Mohammadi, Alireza ; Malik, Hafiz ; Abbaszadeh, Masoud ( June 2022 , 2022 American Control Conference (ACC))

   There is ample evidence in the automotive cybersecurity literature that the car brake ECUs can be maliciously reprogrammed. Motivated by such threat, this paper investigates the capabilities of an adversary who can directly control the frictional brake actuators and would like to induce wheel lockup conditions leading to catastrophic road injuries. This paper demonstrates that the adversary despite having a limited knowledge of the tire-road interaction characteristics has the capability of driving the states of the vehicle traction dynamics to a vicinity of the lockup manifold in a finite time by means of a properly designed attack policy for the frictional brakes. This attack policy relies on employing a predefined-time controller and a nonlinear disturbance observer acting on the wheel slip error dynamics. Simulations under various road conditions demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack policy. 

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3. Generation of CAN-based Wheel Lockup Attacks on the Dynamics of Vehicle Traction

   Mohammadi, Alireza ; Malik, Hafiz ; Abbaszadeh, Masoud ( January 2022 , Workshop on Automotive and Autonomous Vehicle Security (AutoSec) 2022)

   Recent automotive hacking incidences have demonstrated that when an adversary manages to gain access to a safety-critical CAN, severe safety implications will ensue. Under such threats, this paper explores the capabilities of an adversary who is interested in engaging the car brakes at full speed and would like to cause wheel lockup conditions leading to catastrophic road injuries. This paper shows that the physical capabilities of a CAN attacker can be studied through the lens of closed-loop attack policy design. In particular, it is demonstrated that the adversary can cause wheel lockups by means of closed-loop attack policies for commanding the frictional brake actuators under a limited knowledge of the tire-road interaction characteristics. The effectiveness of the proposed wheel lockup attack policy is shown via numerical simulations under different road conditions. 

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4. Generation of Time-Varying Impedance Attacks Against Haptic Shared Control Steering Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342459  

   Mohammadi, Alireza ; Malik, Hafiz ( October 2023 , 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS))

   The safety-critical nature of vehicle steering is one of the main motivations for exploring the space of possible cyber-physical attacks against the steering systems of modern vehicles. This paper investigates the adversarial capabilities for destabilizing the interaction dynamics between human drivers and vehicle haptic shared control (HSC) steering systems. In contrast to the conventional robotics literature, where the main objective is to render the human-automation interaction dynamics stable by ensuring passivity, this paper takes the exact opposite route. In particular, to investigate the damaging capabilities of a successful cyber-physical attack, this paper demonstrates that an attacker who targets the HSC steering system can destabilize the interaction dynamics between the human driver and the vehicle HSC steering system through synthesis of time-varying impedance profiles. Specifically, it is shown that the adversary can utilize a properly designed non-passive and time-varying adversarial impedance target dynamics, which are fed with a linear combination of the human driver and the steering column torques. Using these target dynamics, it is possible for the adversary to generate in realtime a reference angular command for the driver input device and the directional control steering assembly of the vehicle. Furthermore, it is shown that the adversary can make the steering wheel and the vehicle steering column angular positions to follow the reference command generated by the time-varying impedance target dynamics using proper adaptive control strategies. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of such time-varying impedance attacks, which result in a non-passive and inherently unstable interaction between the driver and the HSC steering system. 

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5. Vehicle Lateral Motion Dynamics Under Braking/ABS Cyber-Physical Attacks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2023.3293424  

   Mohammadi, Alireza ; Malik, Hafiz ; Abbaszadeh, Masoud ( January 2023 , IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security)

   In face of an increasing number of automotive cyber-physical threat scenarios, the issue of adversarial destabilization of the lateral motion of target vehicles through direct attacks on their steering systems has been extensively studied. A more subtle question is whether a cyberattacker can destabilize the target vehicle lateral motion through improper engagement of the vehicle brakes and/or anti-lock braking systems (ABS). Motivated by such a question, this paper investigates the impact of cyber-physical attacks that exploit the braking/ABS systems to adversely affect the lateral motion stability of the targeted vehicles. Using a hybrid physical/dynamic tire-road friction model, it is shown that if a braking system/ABS attacker manages to continuously vary the longitudinal slips of the wheels, they can violate the necessary conditions for asymptotic stability of the underlying linear time-varying (LTV) dynamics of the lateral motion. Furthermore, the minimal perturbations of the wheel longitudinal slips that result in lateral motion instability under fixed slip values are derived. Finally, a real-time algorithm for monitoring the lateral motion dynamics of vehicles against braking/ABS cyber-physical attacks is devised. This algorithm, which can be efficiently computed using the modest computational resources of automotive embedded processors, can be utilized along with other intrusion detection techniques to infer whether a vehicle braking system/ABS is experiencing a cyber-physical attack. Numerical simulations in the presence of realistic CAN bus delays, destabilizing slip value perturbations obtained from solving quadratic programs on an embedded ARM Cortex-M3 emulator, and side-wind gusts demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. 

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