Generation of Wheel Lockup Attacks on Nonlinear Dynamics of Vehicle Traction

Abstract

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 real-time 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.

Vehicular Applications of Koopman Operator Theory—A Survey

“…Given the emergence of cyber-threats against connected and autonomous vehicles as well as robotic systems (see, e.g., [114], [115]), a future research direction might include utilizing Koopman operator-based algorithms for designing cyber-resilient vehicular and smart mobility applications (see, e.g., [116] for a related line of research). Another potential research direction is using Koopman operator-based algorithms for predicting the motion of vulnerable road users (VRUs), e.g., pedestrians and cyclists (see, e.g., [117], [118]).…”