Assessing the Impact of Cyber Attacks on Traffic Flow with Mixed Autonomous and Human-Driven Vehicles

With the advancement of vehicular technology, autonomous vehicles (AVs) are going to share roads with human-driven vehicles (HDVs), introducing increased connectivity and new substantial attack surfaces, making the transport system vulnerable to exploitation. Through extensive simulations using the Berlin scenario in Eclipse MOSAIC, in this paper, we investigate the effects a range of cyber attacks, such as communication attacks like sybil and spoofing on vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle to vehicle (V2V), and other attacks such as vehicle sabotage and road side unit (RSU) attacks, to effect the traffic flow using mean values from multiple simulations for analysis. Our investigation demonstrates that certain cyber attacks have a paramount effect on the flow of traffic, with the potential to result in complete road blockages during peak hours traffic.