Vehicle Lateral Motion Dynamics Under Braking/ABS Cyber-Physical Attacks

In face of an increasing number of automotive cyber-physical threat scenarios, the issue of adversarial destabilization of the lateral motion of target vehicles through direct attacks on their steering systems has been extensively studied. A more subtle question is whether a cyberattacker can destabilize the target vehicle lateral motion through improper engagement of the vehicle brakes and/or anti-lock braking systems (ABS). Motivated by such a question, this paper investigates the impact of cyber-physical attacks that exploit the braking/ABS systems to adversely affect the lateral motion stability of the targeted vehicles. Using a hybrid physical/dynamic tire-road friction model, it is shown that if a braking system/ABS attacker manages to continuously vary the longitudinal slips of the wheels, they can violate the necessary conditions for asymptotic stability of the underlying linear time-varying (LTV) dynamics of the lateral motion. Furthermore, the minimal perturbations of the wheel longitudinal slips that result in lateral motion instability under fixed slip values are derived. Finally, a real-time algorithm for monitoring the lateral motion dynamics of vehicles against braking/ABS cyber-physical attacks is devised. This algorithm, which can be efficiently computed using the modest computational resources of automotive embedded processors, can be utilized along with other intrusion detection techniques to infer whether a vehicle braking system/ABS is experiencing a cyber-physical attack. Numerical simulations in the presence of realistic CAN bus delays, destabilizing slip value perturbations obtained from solving quadratic programs on an embedded ARM Cortex-M3 emulator, and side-wind gusts demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the impact of cyber-physical attacks on the braking/ABS systems to destabilize the lateral motion stability of targeted vehicles. It shows that continuous variation of the longitudinal slips of the wheels can violate the necessary conditions for stability of the lateral motion dynamics. It also proposes a real-time algorithm for monitoring the lateral motion dynamics against braking/ABS cyber-physical attacks.