Building Cyber-Resilient Road Transport Networks

The explosive growth in connected vehicle infrastructures and IoT-enabled systems opens the potential for transportation disruptions stemming from cyber-attacks on road infrastructures. Researchers and threat actors have recently demonstrated that hackers could interfere with critical vehicle safety functions, manipulate driving behaviors, and tamper with traffic control systems. Such attacks could result in cascading traffic disruptions that are hitherto largely unquantified. Here, we quantify the impacts of cyber-attacks on road transportation by simulating the large-scale traffic disruptions resulting from attacks. We investigate a broad range of representative scenarios of road-infrastructure related cyber-attacks. We develop a novel network-based algorithm to detect signatures of real-time cyber-attacks on road traffic networks using real-time traffic data. Based on our results, we discuss the potential for coordinated rerouting to mitigate cascading traffic jams as a result of cyber-attacks on road transportation infrastructures.