Deception in Autonomous Transport Systems: Threats, Impacts and Mitigation Policies

This book provides a comprehensive overview of deception in autonomous transport systems. This involves investigating the threats facing autonomous transport systems and how they can contribute towards a deceptive attack, followed by their potential impact if successful, and finally, how they can be mitigated. The work in this book is grouped into three parts. This first part focuses on the area of smart cities, policies, and ethics. This includes critically appraising the trade-off between functionality and security with connected and autonomous vehicles. The second discusses a range of AI applications in the wider field of smart transport and mobility, such as detecting anomalies in vehicle behaviour to investigating detecting disobedient vehicles. Finally, the third part presents and discusses cybersecurity-related aspects to consider when dealing with Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and smart urban infrastructure. This includes analysing different attacks to investigating secure communication technologies.

CAVs are a game-changing technology with the potential to transform the way transport is perceived, mobility is serviced, travel ecosystems ’behave’, and cities and societies as a whole function. There are many foreseen safety, accessibility and sustainability benefits resulting from the adoption of CAVs because of their ability, in theory, to operate error-free and collaboratively, ranging from accident prevention, congestion reduction and decreased carbon emissions to time savings, increased social inclusion, optimised routing, and better traffic control. However, no matter what the expected benefits are, CAVs are at the same time susceptible to an unprecedented number of new digital and physical threats. The severity of these threats has resulted in an increased effort to deepen our understanding of CAVs when it comes to their safety and resilience. In this complex and multi-faceted scenario, this book aims to provide an extensive overview of the risks related to the malicious exploitation of CAVs and beyond, the potential ways in which vulnerabilities can be exploited, prevention and mitigation policies and techniques, and the impact that the non-acceptance of Connected and Autonomous Mobility can have on the Smart City agenda.

This book targets researchers, practitioners, and advanced-level students in computer science and transport engineering.

Professor Simon Parkinson is an award-winning academic in the intersection between Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence. He is a Professor at the University of Huddersfield and a member of the UK Government’s Cyber Security Advisory Board (GCAB). He has been researching topics on the interface between AI and Cyber Security, with a focus on transport. He has led to the completion of funded projects with a total value of £1.3M, with funding coming from the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), EU Commission, and The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), amongst others. His consultancy work for the UK Government into threats facing Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (Ref: SO18277) resulted in influential work helping to shape government standards (PAS 1885:2018) and EU policy (EUR 29782 EN). He has experience in organising and engaging in conferences and knowledge dissemination events. He has also co-edited two books on topics including Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security and Digital Forensics.

Professor Mauro Vallati is an accomplished academic with a proven track record in the field of AI for sustainable transport. He holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship on AI for Autonomic Urban Traffic Monitoring and Control. He is an ACM Senior Member and ACM Distinguished Speaker on AI for the UK. He is a Professor of AI at the University of Huddersfield, where he leads the Autonomous Intelligent Systems research centre and the AI for Urban Traffic Control research team, and Visiting Professor at the University of Genova, Italy. Prof Vallati has extensive experience in real-world applications of AI methods and techniques to sustainable transport, as testified by the patents in the field and by the support of Innovate UK, UKRI, EPSRC, EU, and industry (totalling more than £2M). He actively supports the research community by supervising and examining PhD Students (both in the UK and in the EU), organising top-ranked conferences, and taking editorial roles in major academic journals.
Alexandros Nikitas is a Professor in Smart Transport for Huddersfield Business School, University of Huddersfield, UK. Prof Nikitas is Huddersfield’s Future Mobility Lab Founding Director and the Deputy Director of the School’s Behavioural Research Centre. Prof Nikitas is the Chair of the Universities’ Transport Study Group’s Executive Committee, a group that is the premier academic forum in the UK and Ireland for transport research and teaching with 60 Universities. Prof Nikitas has worked extensively in the areas of sustainable and socially inclusive mobility and automated, connected, alternatively fuelled and shared transport. He is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Transport & Health and a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journals Research in Transportation Business & Management and Case Studies on Transport Policy. His research has been published in more than 90 journal and conference papers. He has led and/or worked with great success among others on Horizon 2020 and FP7 programmes and organized several academic workshops and top conference sessions. Earlier in his career, Prof Nikitas was a Senior Researcher in Urban Futures and Transportation for Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. He has also been an invited visiting scholar for Tongji University and Chang’an University in China and EC’s Joint Research Centre Ispra, Italy. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as a Local Councilor for his hometown, Drama, Greece.