Hidden Signatures

Generally, applications that leverage multi-vehicle networks assume that all vehicles are cooperative while performing desired operations to maintain swarming formations and can exchange all necessary information to complete a task. However, these vehicles are susceptible to malicious external cyber-attacks that can affect system performance or intercept safety-critical information. We propose to utilize a side-channel information exchange that contains hidden data for vehicles in the network to detect that is unknown to potential attackers.</p>

Virtual spring-damper meshes for proximity-based formation control are leveraged for both detection of misbehaving vehicles and also any hidden signatures that are being passed from nearby vehicles. In our work, we apply our framework to applications where mobile robotic teams relay safety-critical information concerning any discovered object of interest to the remaining vehicles by utilizing hidden signatures to maintain secrecy from potential attackers.

More details about our framework can be found in our accepted paper [IROS '21]. Further simulation and experiment videos can be viewed from the following webpage. Below are a sequence of snapshots from both a Matlab simulation and a lab experiment using TurtleBot2 robots.