Background
Cooperative autonomous vehicle operation is an important step in making roadways safer and more efficient. Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) have great potential to improve automobile safety and traffic flow, particularly in cooperative applications where perception data is shared between vehicles. However, this cooperative data must be protected against malicious intent and unintentional errors that could cause accidents. Previous research has focused on singular security or reliability issues for cooperative driving in specific scenarios, rather than the complete set of errors together.
Invention Description
Researchers at Arizona State University have developed CONClave, which is a new protocol designed to ensure secure and reliable cooperative perception among Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and Cooperative Infrastructure Sensors (CISs). This protocol integrates a unique combination of authentication, consensus, and trust scoring mechanisms, and addresses the critical challenges of securing cooperative applications from both malicious attacks and unintentional errors. CONClave helps enhance autonomous vehicle safety and efficiency by preventing the dissemination of faulty data from vehicles with sensor malfunctions, and overcomes the limitations of existing methods.
Potential Applications:
- Automotive safety systems for CAVs
- Intelligent transportation systems & smart city infrastructure
- Security & reliability solutions for vehicular network communications
Benefits and Advantages:
- Enhanced security – uses a three-party homomorphic hashing-based authentication process
- Improved reliability – uses a BOSCO-based consensus protocol tailored for dynamic vehicular networks
- Less time required – significant reduction in fault detection and computational requirements
- High accuracy – advanced error detection capabilities via perception trust scoring technique that assesses sensor accuracy
- Simple – minimal overhead added to the cooperative perception process