Security by Design via Radio Fingerprinting for Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Networks

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

With the deployment of new 5G services, many of the Critical infrastructures in Ontario and Canada such as Connected Vehicles and Smart Infrastructures will be deployed on RF-based networks. As such, society will be heavily dependent on the ability to protect these networks as well as the Radio Spectrum as a whole. Solutions such as AI based transmitter fingerprinting to identify and track interference sources or malicious actors will be one of the several key technologies to meet the needs of next generation wireless networks. While vehicular connectivity and autonomy has significant potential as an economic driver, security, privacy and resilience of the infrastructures remain vulnerabilities. This project aims to introduce novel radio fingerprinting solutions to improve the security of connected and autonomous vehicles so that security is introduced by design at the physical layer of a CAV network to identify and characterize unique characteristics of the transmitted signals. As a widely investigated concept to secure wireless communication systems, the impact of the channel and physical conditions, as well as computational complexity remain issues to be addressed in radio fingerprinting. Although there exist solutions to analyze network traffic and/or application/service layer, security (and safety) offered at the physical layer remains challenges to be addressed. With this in mind, this project will develop solutions for feature engineering and design of effective discriminants on RF signals, and for Addressing the environmental and channel conditions in the radio fingerprinting design. Solutions developed by the project will build on deep learning models and adversarial machine learning-based methods. Once completed, the project will advance the existing efforts to secure CAV networks by introducing radio fingerprinting into CAV network. With a diverse and inclusive team of researchers, this project will introduce a remarkable opportunity for such solution through authentication and access control at the physical layer. By focusing on CAVs, the outcomes of this project will improve the productivity of the private sector and efficiency of the public sector in Ontario and in Canada by enabling the development of secure connectivity for CAVs by design.