How are pedestrian safety compromised under suppressed warning cyberattacks at a connected intersection? - Exploring...

Area of Science:

• Road safety engineering
• Human-computer interaction
• Cybersecurity in transportation

Background:

• Pedestrians are highly vulnerable road users, particularly at intersections.
• Connected vehicle (CV) warning systems aim to enhance driver awareness and pedestrian yielding behavior.
• Cyberattacks suppressing these warnings pose a significant, understudied threat to traffic safety.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of cyberattacks on pedestrian warning systems on vehicle-pedestrian interactions and safety.
• To quantify the safety degradation caused by the removal of dashboard pedestrian warnings.

Main Methods:

• A controlled driving-simulator experiment with 32 participants under benchmark and cyberattack conditions.
• Development of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based generative framework with surrogate safety measurements (SSM) to augment limited experimental data.
• Analysis of vehicle-pedestrian interaction trajectories, focusing on time to collision and stop dynamics.

Main Results:

• Cyberattacks significantly increase hazards, evidenced by a greater reduction in time to collision.
• Pedestrian warning suppression degrades safety, particularly affecting stop dynamics and increasing vehicle speed.
• Increasing pedestrian speed consistently reduces safety, with cyberattacks having a more pronounced adverse effect at low speeds (< 0.8 m/s) and greater warning distances (> 15 m).

Conclusions:

• Cyberattacks on pedestrian warning systems introduce substantial risks to vehicle-pedestrian interactions.
• Pedestrian safety is particularly vulnerable to these attacks under low-speed conditions and specific warning distances.
• Findings inform the design of more robust pedestrian warning systems and cyber-resilient traffic safety strategies.