An intelligent security system for autonomous cars based on infrared sensors

Safety and non-safety applications in the external communication systems of self-driving vehicles require authentication of control data, cooperative awareness messages and notification messages. Traditional security systems can prevent attackers from hacking or breaking important system functionality in autonomous vehicles. This paper presents a novel security system designed to protect vehicular ad hoc networks in self-driving and semi-autonomous vehicles that is based on Integrated Circuit Metric technology (ICMetrics). ICMetrics has the ability to secure communication systems in autonomous vehicles using features of the autonomous vehicle system itself. This security system is based on unique extracted features from vehicles behaviour and its sensors. Specifically, features have been extracted from bias values of infrared sensors which are used alongside semantically extracted information from a trace file of a simulated vehicular ad hoc network. The practical experimental implementation and evaluation of this system demonstrates the efficiency in identifying of abnormal/malicious behaviour typical for an attack.