Vulnerability of Fixed-Time Control of Signalized Intersections to Cyber-Tampering
This work addresses cybersecurity risks in traffic management systems, which is an incremental but important domain-specific problem for urban infrastructure planners and security experts.
This paper investigates how fixed-time traffic signal control systems can be compromised when sensor data is tampered with by adversaries, formulating three malicious objectives and solving them using bilevel programming optimization methods, with a case study demonstrating vulnerabilities in a real network.
Recent experimental studies have shown that traffic management systems are vulnerable to cyber-attacks on sensor data. This paper studies the vulnerability of fixed-time control of signalized intersections when sensors measuring traffic flow information are compromised and perturbed by an adversary. The problems are formulated by considering three malicious objectives: 1) worst-case network accumulation, which aims to destabilize the overall network as much as possible; 2) worst-case lane accumulation, which aims to cause worst-case accumulation on some target lanes; and 3) risk-averse target accumulation, which aims to reach a target accumulation by making the minimum perturbation to sensor data. The problems are solved using bilevel programming optimization methods. Finally, a case study of a real network is used to illustrate the results.