An intelligent transportation system (ITS) is a system of vehicles and infrastructure that exchange information in real time and make decisions fully or partially automatically. The operations of ITS heavily rely on data collection and transmission, which is subject to prevalent remote and/or on-site attacks. Actual incidents have been reported where hackers spoofed traffic sensor data or created phantom traffic jams in navigation apps. It is hard to deterministically predict when a component will be attacked, and which component will be attacked. Therefore, appropriate proactive and/or responsive mechanisms should be designed to enable ITS to tolerate a certain level of attacks.
Game theory is a powerful tool for security risk analysis that has been extensively used in various engineering systems, and game-theoretic approaches have been applied to studying the security of routing in transportation and communications. This project will be the basis for a synthesis of game theory and queuing theory, essential for capturing the interaction between the queuing dynamics and players decisions, in order to protect the ITS system from spoofing and attacks.
