Platoon Vulnerability due to Network Topology and Targeted Vehicle

Vehicle platooning is a key application for intelligent transportation systems that brings the joint problem of maintaining safety and security as prioritized requirements. The complex and dynamic electromagnetic environment coupled with sophisticated adversarial threats motivate better understanding of platoon control resilience from traditional faults, disturbances, and attack injects. An open problem for this understanding is the impact that information flow (communication network) topologies have on the attack and defense strategies for vehicular platoons. As the topology changes, vulnerability amongst platoon members and their individual contributions to the overall platoon security also change. This paper evaluates the impact of member-specific targeting informed by topology and demonstrates that targeting one member over another can be advantageous to the attacker. Furthermore, we present a taxonomy to identify topologies by key characteristics as an option for an industry standard.