Mateen Malik, Computer and Network Systems

Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) systems combine connectivity, cooperation, and automation to enable vehicles to exchange information with other vehicles, infrastructure, and remote operators. As these systems depend on wireless communication for safety-critical decision making, they are inherently vulnerable to communication-jamming attacks. A few examples of these attacks are communication delay, Denial-of-Service (DoS), deceptive, destructive, and barrage jamming. These attacks have the ability to degrade the availability and integrity of transmitted data. To address this concern, this thesis proposes a reference model for security benchmarking that enables structured, repeatable evaluation of CCAM resilience against communication-jamming attacks. Our security benchmarking approach supports both simulation-based and physical testing. Simulation-based benchmarking is essential for safely conducting large-scale, safety-critical experiments, while physical testing validates simulation outcomes under real-world conditions. The primary components of the benchmarking framework consist of a driving scenario, attack model, System Under Test (SUT), benchmark execution, system response, and data analysis. To support attack modeling, benchmark execution, and outcome analysis, we developed ComFASE, a communication-based fault and attack simulation engine. ComFASE integrates with Plexe, Veins, OMNeT++, and SUMO simulation frameworks. Using ComFASE, we implement and evaluate five jamming attacks injected into the IEEE 802.11p physical-layer model. To showcase the framework’s capabilities, we conducted a systematic evaluation and improvement of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) algorithms. To demonstrate broader applicability, we also evaluate a Remotely Operated Road Vehicle (RORV) application in a Software-in-the-Loop (SiL) environment. Finally, we perform physical barrage-jamming experiments in a Radio Frequency (RF) anechoic chamber to assess the jamming resilience of WiFi communication protocols, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Secure Reliable Transmission (SRT) protocol used for live video streaming. Overall, this thesis establishes the foundational methods, tools, and analytical insights needed for systematically evaluating CCAM systems through our proposed
security benchmarking framework.