Impacts of misbehavior in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) : The case of cooperative maneuvers

Abstract: Connected and autonomous vehicles are emerging technologies that have fostered the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). ITS has the objective of optimizing traffic safety, mobility, and fuel consumption. To achieve this, a range of different services are provided that utilize communication in a vehicular network. One of these services that has received a lot of attention lately due to its ongoing standardization is the Maneuver Coordination Service (MCS). MCS has already shown great potential in the support of complex traffic areas, also called Transition Area (TA), where vehicles must cooperate to avoid Transition of Controls (ToCs). ITS-services often rely on communicated data; small errors, such as inaccessible or incorrect data, can cause the system to behave incorrectly. Signal interference (jamming) can cause communication interruptions, making vehicles unaware of each other. Incorrect data can be intentional due to data injection attacks, but also unintentional due to malfunctioning sensors, making vehicles incorrectly aware of each other. Incorrect behavior in systems such as ITS can lead to traffic congestion or even life-threatening collisions. This study focuses on MCS and examines traffic behavior when the service, in a generic traffic scenario, is subjected to jamming and falsification attacks with a variety of strategies (negative and positive speed, acceleration and position offset). We considered external attackers (not authenticated) that can disrupt communication, as well as internal attackers (authenticated) that are limited to tampering with outgoing data. Through severe collisions and travel time delays, the results show an impact on both safety and mobility. The results also show that different attacks with different impacts on the adversary can cause similar effects on the traffic, thus allowing the adversary to choose attacks based on the desired impact and its rationality, i.e. its willingness to be part of the impact. The study also proposes an extension to an already proposed Maneuver Coordination Protocol (MCP). We show that our extended MCP can be beneficial in avoiding dangerous maneuvers that could lead to collisions with cars in the blind spot.