Generation of CAN-based Wheel Lockup Attacks on the Dynamics of Vehicle Traction

Recent automotive hacking incidences have demonstrated that when an adversary manages to gain access to a safety-critical CAN, severe safety implications will ensue. Under such threats, this paper explores the capabilities of an adversary who is interested in engaging the car brakes at full speed and would like to cause wheel lockup conditions leading to catastrophic road injuries. This paper shows that the physical capabilities of a CAN attacker can be studied through the lens of closed-loop attack policy design. In particular, it is demonstrated that the adversary can cause wheel lockups by means of closed-loop attack policies for commanding the frictional brake actuators under a limited knowledge of the tire-road interaction characteristics. The effectiveness of the proposed wheel lockup attack policy is shown via numerical simulations under different road conditions.