Stability Analysis of Two-Species PDE Traffic Models in Cyber-Attack Scenarios

This paper considers a class of cyber-attacks wherein an attacker has the ability to hack into a subset of vehicles driving on a highway, and inject subtle changes into their driving parameter(s). As a consequence of such changes, these vehicles (referred to as malicious vehicles) are able to destabilize the traffic even while the non-malicious (normal) vehicles continue to drive with their original parameter values. The traffic system comprising the mix of malicious and normal vehicles are modeled using a two-species, fourth order system of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). On this system of PDEs, a stability analysis is performed and used to partition the traffic parameter space into stable and unstable regimes. Simulations are presented to demonstrate the validity of the results.