EurekAlert July 28, 2019
A team of researchers in the US (Georgia Institute of Technology, industry) studied a scenario envisioned by cybersecurity experts leading to a large number of internet-connected vehicles being suddenly and simultaneously disabled. To investigate the aftermath of the post hack they used an agent-based simulation and discovered the critical relevance of percolation for probabilistically predicting the outcomes on a multilane road in the immediate aftermath of a vehicle-targeted cyberattack. They developed an analytic percolation-based model to rapidly assess road conditions given the density of disabled vehicles and applied it to study the street network of Manhattan revealing the city’s vulnerability to this particular cyberphysical attack. While a comprehensive investigation of city-scale traffic around hacked vehicles is an extremely complicated problem, they found that the statistical physics of percolation can provide an estimate of the number of vehicles that critically disrupts citywide traffic flow…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE