Human Driver Temperament and the Safety Impact of a C-V2X Denial-of-Service Flooding Attack in Mixed-Autonomy Traffic

Abstract

Cooperative and connected automated vehicles (CAVs) rely on Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) messages to cross signalized intersections; a denial-of-service (DoS) flood that blocks SPaT forces CAVs into a fail-safe mode. Because human-driven vehicles share the intersection, the safety consequence depends not only on the attack and the CAV fail-safe policy, but on how the surrounding human drivers behave. We investigate this human-factors dimension with a coupled OMNeT++/INET (5G NR-V2X) and SUMO microsimulation of a signalized corridor, sweeping CAV market penetration (10-90%), four calibrated driver temperaments (cautious to aggressive) and two standards-based fail-safe policies, a minimal-risk maneuver (MRM) and an adaptive cruise control (ACC) keep-driving fallback, with each attack arm differenced against its policy-matched no-attack baseline. Temperament's effect on the attack is specific and modest rather than a blanket amplification. Aggressive surroundings worsen one metric, the hard-braking a keep-driving fail-safe forces on nearby drivers (p = 0.03), rising from near zero to +8 episodes/1000 veh-s. They appear to dampen rear-end conflicts, but only because the flood clears the queues aggressive drivers build, so the gain is in flow, not safety. On the attack's primary signatures, CAV red-light running and crossing conflicts, temperament has no detectable effect. It instead dominates baseline risk, producing a 13- to 18-fold cautious-to-aggressive gradient far larger than the attack itself, which acts through a channel already congested by CAV adoption. Human driver populations determine how dangerous the intersection is but do not systematically amplify this attack, so fail-safe design cannot assume a cautious test population bounds the risk.