# A game-theoretic analysis of DoS attacks on driverless vehicles

## TL;DR

This paper models the strategic interactions between attackers and defenders of driverless vehicle fleets using game theory, revealing vulnerabilities and infrastructure needs for resilience against DoS attacks.

## Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic framework to analyze DoS attacks on autonomous vehicle fleets and highlights the need for infrastructure redesign for robustness.

## Key findings

- Attackers can effectively cripple vehicle fleets using sensor saturation attacks.
- Most cities require infrastructure upgrades to defend against DoS attacks.
- Road network redesigns are necessary for improved robustness.

## Abstract

Driverless vehicles are expected to form the foundation of future connected transport infrastructure. A key weakness of connected vehicles is their vulnerability to physical-proximity attacks such as sensor saturation attacks. It is natural to study whether such attacks can be used to disrupt swarms of autonomous vehicles used as part of a large fleet providing taxi and courier delivery services. In this paper, we start to examine the strategic options available to attackers and defenders (autonomous-fleet operators) in such conflicts. We find that attackers have the upper hand in most cases and are able to carry out crippling denial-of-service attacks on fleets, by leveraging the inherent deficiencies of road networks identified by techniques from graph analysis. Experimental results on ten cities using real-world courier traces shows that most cities will require upgraded infrastructure to defend driverless vehicles against denial-of-service attacks. We found several hidden costs that impact equipment designers and operators of driverless vehicles - not least, that road-networks need to be redesigned for robustness against attacks thus raising some fundamental questions about the benefits.