Exposing Congestion Attack on Emerging Connected Vehicle based Traffic Signal Control

Yiheng Feng

Abstract:

Connected vehicle (CV) technology will soon transform today’s transportation systems by connecting vehicles and
the transportation infrastructure through wireless communication. Having demonstrated the potential to greatly improve
transportation mobility efficiency, such dramatically increased
connectivity also opens a new door for cyber attacks. In this
work, we perform the first detailed security analysis of the nextgeneration CV-based transportation systems. As a first step, we
target the USDOT (U.S. Department of Transportation) sponsored
CV-based traffic control system, which has been tested and shown
high effectiveness in real road intersections. In the analysis, we
target a realistic threat, namely CV data spoofing from one single
attack vehicle, with the attack goal of creating traffic congestion.
We first analyze the system design and identify data spoofing
strategies that can potentially influence the traffic control. Based
on the strategies, we perform vulnerability analysis by exhaustively trying all the data spoofing options for these strategies
to understand the upper bound of the attack effectiveness. For
the highly effective cases, we analyze the causes and find that
the current signal control algorithm design and implementation
choices are highly vulnerable to data spoofing attacks from even
a single attack vehicle. These vulnerabilities can be exploited
to completely reverse the benefit of the CV-based signal control
system by causing the traffic mobility to be 23.4% worse than
that without adopting such system. We then construct practical
exploits and evaluate them under real-world intersection settings.
The evaluation results are consistent with our vulnerability
analysis, and we find that the attacks can even cause a blocking
effect to jam an entire approach. In the jamming period, 22%
of the vehicles need to spend over 7 minutes for an original halfminute trip, which is 14 times higher. We also discuss defense
directions leveraging the insights from our analysis.