Security of Vehicle Platooning: A Game-Theoretic Approach

In this paper, we study the security of a vehicle platoon exposed to cyber attacks using a game-theoretic approach. The platoon topologies under investigation are directed (called predecessor following) or undirected (bidirectional) weighted graphs. The edge weights specify the quality of the communication links between the vehicles in both the unidirectional/bidirectional data transfer environments. The attacker-detector game is defined as follows. The attacker targets some vehicles in the platoon to attack and the detector deploys monitoring sensors on the vehicles. The attacker’s objective is to be as stealthy to the sensors as possible while the detector tries to place the monitoring sensors to detect the attack impact as much as it can. The existence of Nash Equilibrium (NE) strategies for this game is investigated based on which the detector can choose specific vehicles to put his sensors on and increase the security level of the system. Moreover, we study the effect of adding (or removing) communication weights between vehicles on the game value. The simulation and experimental results conducted on a vehicle platoon setup using Robotic Operating System (ROS) demonstrate the effectiveness of our analyses.