Is your commute driving you crazy?

Abstract

Traffic is not only a source of frustration but also a leading cause of death for people under 35 years of age. Recent research has focused on how driver assistance technologies can be used to mitigate traffic fatalities and create more enjoyable commutes. In this work, we consider cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) or platooning, a driver assistance technology that controls the speed of vehicles and inter-vehicle spacing. CACC equipped cars use radar to fine tune inter-vehicle spacing and dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) to collaboratively accelerate and decelerate. Platooning can reduce fuel consumption by over 5% and increases the density of cars on a highway. Previous work on platooning has focused on proving string stability, which guarantees that the error between cars does not grow with the length of a platoon, but little work has considered the impact an attacker can have on a platoon. To design safe distributed controllers and networks it is essential to understand the possible attacks that could be mounted against platoons.