Extending Adaptive Cruise Control with Machine Learning Intrusion Detection Systems

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that traditional ACC systems are vulnerable to speed injection attacks, and proposes an IDS-augmented control that switches to emergency braking to enhance safety.

Contribution

It introduces ACC-IDS, a simple augmentation of traditional ACC with intrusion detection, to mitigate attack risks and maintain collision avoidance.

Findings

Kalman filter can be bypassed by high-magnitude speed injections

ACC-IDS effectively detects intrusions and triggers emergency braking

The approach preserves ACC's safety guarantees under attack conditions

Abstract

An Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system automatically adjusts the host vehicle's speed to maintain a safe following distance from a lead vehicle. In typical implementations, a feedback controller (e.g., a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller) computes the host vehicle's acceleration using a target speed and a spacing error, defined as the difference between the measured inter-vehicle distance and a desired safe distance. ACC is often assumed to be resilient to fault-injection attacks because a Kalman filter (KF) can smooth noisy speed measurements. However, we show--through analytical proofs and simulation results--that a KF can tolerate injected speed values only up to a bounded threshold. When injected values exceed this threshold, the filter can be driven off track, causing the ACC controller to make unsafe acceleration decisions and potentially leading to collisions. Our main contribution is to augment the PID-based controller with Intrusion Detection System (IDS) outputs, yielding Intrusion Detection Systems-Based Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC-IDS). The ACC-IDS controller is simple and implementable: a binary intrusion flag switches the control law to emergency braking. We prove that augmenting ACC with an IDS, under assumed detection-performance and latency constraints, can mitigate these attacks and help preserve ACC's collision-avoidance guarantees.