Evaluation of Wireless Deauthentication Attacks and Countermeasures on Autonomous Vehicles
Ramnik Singh Reen, Gaurav Dharmani, Rahul Gothwal, Eslam G. AbdAllah · 2023
An autonomous vehicle (AV), also known as driver-less car, is able to operate itself and execute critical activities without the need for human interaction. Sensors, complicated algorithms, machine learning systems and powerful processors are used to run software in autonomous vehicle. The majority of modern car models in the market has integrated Wi-Fi modules which are used to send telemetry data to back-end cloud servers and obtain real-time traffic data. In this paper, we will demonstrate how deauthentication attacks can be successfully executed on Wi-Fi attack surface of an autonomous vehicle. This is accomplished by creating different attack scenarios and performing attack analysis. We analyze mitigation strategies such as enabling Management Frame Protection (MFP) in Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) and using Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) to protect against deauthentication attacks. Based on our analysis, using WPA3 is the best mitigation technique against deauthentication attacks in AVs.