SURE was divided into three Work Packages (WP).
WP1 was devoted to theoretical developments. The starting point for such investigation was based on existing literature for distributed fault detection in large-scale and networked control systems, a topic to which the researcher did contribute in the past years. Anyway, existing results did reveal several shortcomings that prevented a direct application to the scope of SURE. For this reason, new theoretical developments were undertaken, addressing problems of detectability in a probabilistic sense, rather than deterministic; privacy in multi-party estimation; detection of Man-In-The-Middle attacks via watermarking and, finally, detection of attacks in the special case of platooning cars. In particular, privacy was a novel and welcome addition to the existing theoretical approaches, which would be useful for the case of platooning cars autonomous cars: on one side they are used for transporting passengers whom may care for their privacy; on the other, self-driving cars employ state-of-the-art technology and know-how which car-makers would prefer to keep private and avoid it being exposed.
Apart from theoretical results, an interactive and real-time 3D demo was developed in WP2, to allow simulation of a platoon of autonomous cars. The demo allowed users to control the platoon leader car, and introduce simulated cyber-attacks affecting the communication with a follower car. The detection algorithms developed in WP1 were implemented, and the user had the possibility of seeing the effects of turning them on or off.
Finally, in WP3 a pair of autonomous small-scale RC cars were used in laboratory condition to test the implementation of platooning algorithms, thus moving results from WP1 and WP2 from the theoretical and simulation realms to the laboratory floor.
The following papers were presented at top-level conferences in the field of control systems theory and fault detection.
[1] V. Rostampour et al., “A set based probabilistic approach to threshold design for optimal fault detection,” 2017.
[2] R. M. G. Ferrari et al., “Detection and isolation of routing attacks through sensor watermarking," 2017.
[3] R. M. G. Ferrari et al., “Detection and Isolation of Replay Attacks through Sensor Watermarking,” 2017.
[4] R. M. G. Ferrari et al., “Detection of Sensor Data Injection Attacks with Multiplicative Watermarking,” 2018.
[5] N. Jahanshahi et al., “Attack Detection and Estimation in Cooperative Vehicles Platoons: A Sliding Mode Observer Approach,” 2018.
[6] V. Rostampour et al., “Differentially-Private Distributed Fault Diagnosis for Large-Scale Nonlinear Uncertain Systems,” 2018 (finalist for the Paul M. Frank Award).
Results were presented to the general public during two scientific festivals in The Netherlands (International Festival of Technology at Delft, June 2018; and European Researchers' Night at Rotterdam, September 2018). In this occasion the public was able to use the interactive real-time demo that was developed in WP2, and so to better understand current risks and limitations regarding security in cooperative self driving cars.
Finally, the researcher did obtained a tenure-track position as Asst. Prof. at TU Delft, as a consequence of the results generated during SURE.
