# Cyber-physical risks of hacked Internet-connected vehicles

## TL;DR

This paper explores the cyber-physical risks of hacking Internet-connected vehicles, demonstrating how large-scale vehicle disablement can cause traffic disruptions and city-wide vulnerabilities through percolation modeling and simulations.

## Contribution

It introduces a percolation-based analytical model to predict traffic flow disruptions caused by cyber attacks on connected vehicles, highlighting urban vulnerability.

## Key findings

- Percolation models can predict traffic disruptions after vehicle disablement.
- Large-scale vehicle hacking can cause significant traffic and city infrastructure risks.
- Simulations show critical thresholds for network-wide traffic breakdowns.

## Abstract

The integration of automotive technology with Internet-connectivity promises to both dramatically improve transportation, while simultaneously introducing the potential for new unknown risks. Internet-connected vehicles are like digital data because they can be targeted for malicious hacking. Unlike digital data, however, Internet-connected vehicles are cyber-physical systems that physically interact with each other and their environment. As such, the extension of cybersecurity concerns into the cyber-physical domain introduces new possibilities for self-organized phenomena in traffic flow. Here, we study a scenario envisioned by cybersecurity experts leading to a large number of Internet-connected vehicles being suddenly and simultaneously disabled. We investigate post-hack traffic using agent-based simulations, and discover the critical relevance of percolation for probabilistically predicting the outcomes on a multi-lane road in the immediate aftermath of a vehicle-targeted cyber attack. We develop an analytic percolation-based model to rapidly assess road conditions given the density of disabled vehicles and apply it to study the street network of Manhattan (NY, USA) revealing the city's vulnerability to this particular cyber-physical attack.