Safety, Stability and Environmental Impact of FDI Attacks on Vehicular Platoons

Vehicular platooning is a promising technology for improving road safety, increasing vehicle efficiency, and reducing traffic congestion by enabling high-speed vehicles to travel in close formation with minimum inter-vehicular distance. However, a False Data Injection (FDI) attack can destabilise and break up vehicular platoons in several different ways. First, an attacker can inject false leave or split messages leading to a breakup of the vehicular platoon. Another way is by sending fake beacons or tampering information (such as speed, acceleration, distance, location etc) in a beacon. Upon receiving this false data, the platoon will destabilise as the members receives tampered information from the attacker. In this paper, we studied the impact of FDI attacks on the vehicular platoon by modifying significant information in a beacon. We carried out a simulation-based study, where a FDI attacker is modelled in Plexe simulator to attack a platoon. We considered two scenarios for an FDI attack, i.e., the attacker can be present both inside and outside of the platoon. Further, two flavours of FDI attacks are implemented, i.e., (1) Constant FDI: where, the attacker is launching FDI attack constantly throughout it's journey, and (2) Intelligent On-Off FDI: where the attacker is performing FDI for short period of time and then hides his identity by performing legitimate communication with platoon members. We studied the impact of FDI attacks on vehicular platoons from three significant aspects: environmental (CO2 emissions), safety (distance), and stability (speed). Our study showed that FDI attacks can have drastic impact on the vehicular platoons.