Mitigating Degradation Attacks in Cooperative Autonomous Driving via Intention Sharing: A Vehicle-in-the-Loop Study

Abstract: Communication delays induced by cyber attacks present a critical challenge to the safe operation of connected autonomous driving. This study investigates the use of intention sharing communication strategy to enhance the resilience of model predictive controllers under Denial-of-Service attacks. We employ a vehicle-in-the-loop testbed integrating a real drive-by-wire vehicle with a microscopic traffic simulator and vehicle-to-X communication infrastructure. We emulate Denial-of-service attacks that induce communication delays of up to two seconds. We evaluate three controller variants: baseline status-sharing, intention-sharing, and delay-aware intention-sharing control. Experimental results reveal that while baseline control suffers significant performance degradation and frequent collisions under adversarial delay, intention sharing eliminates collisions and maintains behavior near nominal levels for the tested scenarios. These findings demonstrate the practical potential of intention-sharing architectures for safeguarding connected vehicles against network-layer degradation.