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1. Stealthy Tracking of Autonomous Vehicles with Cache Side Channels

   Luo, M Luo; Myers, A; Suh, G (August 2020, 29th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 20))

   Autonomous vehicles are becoming increasingly popular, but their reliance on computer systems to sense and operate in the physical world introduces new security risks. In this paper, we show that the location privacy of an autonomous vehicle may be compromised by software side-channel attacks if localization software shares a hardware platform with an attack program. In particular, we demonstrate that a cache side-channel attack can be used to infer the route or the location of a vehicle that runs the adaptive Monte-Carlo localization (AMCL) algorithm. The main contributions of the paper are as follows. First, we show that adaptive behaviors of perception and control algorithms may introduce new side-channel vulnerabilities that reveal the physical properties of a vehicle or its environment. Second, we introduce statistical learning models that infer the AMCL algorithm's state from cache access patterns and predict the route or the location of a vehicle from the trace of the AMCL state. Third, we implement and demonstrate the attack on a realistic software stack using real-world sensor data recorded on city roads. Our findings suggest that autonomous driving software needs strong timing-channel protection for location privacy. 

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2. Stealthy Tracking of Autonomous Vehicles with Cache Side Channels

   Luo, Mulong Luo; Myers, Andrew C.; Suh, G. Edward (August 2000, USENIX Security Symposium)

   null (Ed.)

   Autonomous vehicles are becoming increasingly popular, but their reliance on computer systems to sense and operate in the physical world introduces new security risks. In this paper, we show that the location privacy of an autonomous vehicle may be compromised by software side-channel attacks if localization software shares a hardware platform with an attack program. In particular, we demonstrate that a cache side-channel attack can be used to infer the route or the location of a vehicle that runs the adaptive Monte-Carlo localization (AMCL) algorithm. The main contributions of the paper are as follows. First, we show that adaptive behaviors of perception and control algorithms may introduce new side-channel vulnerabilities that reveal the physical properties of a vehicle or its environment. Second, we introduce statistical learning models that infer the AMCL algorithm's state from cache access patterns and predict the route or the location of a vehicle from the trace of the AMCL state. Third, we implement and demonstrate the attack on a realistic software stack using real-world sensor data recorded on city roads. Our findings suggest that autonomous driving software needs strong timing-channel protection for location privacy. 

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3. A First Physical-World Trajectory Prediction Attack via LiDAR-induced Deceptions in Autonomous Driving

   Lou, Y; Zhu, Y; Song, Q; Tan, R; Qiao, C; Lee, Wei-Bin; Wang, J (August 2024, IEEE security privacy)

   Trajectory prediction forecasts nearby agents’ moves based on their historical trajectories. Accurate trajectory prediction (or prediction in short) is crucial for autonomous vehicles (AVs). Existing attacks compromise the prediction model of a victim AV by directly manipulating the historical trajectory of an attacker AV, which has limited real-world applicability. This paper, for the first time, explores an indirect attack approach that induces prediction errors via attacks against the perception module of a victim AV. Although it has been shown that physically realizable attacks against LiDAR-based perception are possible by placing a few objects at strategic locations, it is still an open challenge to find an object location from the vast search space in order to launch effective attacks against prediction under varying victim AV velocities. Through analysis, we observe that a prediction model is prone to an attack focusing on a single point in the scene. Consequently, we propose a novel two-stage attack framework to realize the single-point attack. The first stage of predictionside attack efficiently identifies, guided by the distribution of detection results under object-based attacks against perception, the state perturbations for the prediction model that are effective and velocity-insensitive. In the second stage of location matching, we match the feasible object locations with the found state perturbations. Our evaluation using a public autonomous driving dataset shows that our attack causes a collision rate of up to 63% and various hazardous responses of the victim AV. The effectiveness of our attack is also demonstrated on a real testbed car 1. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first security analysis spanning from LiDARbased perception to prediction in autonomous driving, leading to a realistic attack on prediction. To counteract the proposed attack, potential defenses are discussed. 

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4. Invisible for both Camera and LiDAR: Security of Multi-Sensor Fusion based Perception in Autonomous Driving Under Physical-World Attacks

   Cao, Yulong; Wang, Ningfei; Xiao, Chaowei; Yang, Dawei; Fang, Jin; Yang, Ruigang; Chen, Qi Alfred; Liu, Mingyan; Li, Bo (January 2021, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P))

   null (Ed.)

   In Autonomous Driving (AD) systems, perception is both security and safety critical. Despite various prior studies on its security issues, all of them only consider attacks on cameraor LiDAR-based AD perception alone. However, production AD systems today predominantly adopt a Multi-Sensor Fusion (MSF) based design, which in principle can be more robust against these attacks under the assumption that not all fusion sources are (or can be) attacked at the same time. In this paper, we present the first study of security issues of MSF-based perception in AD systems. We directly challenge the basic MSF design assumption above by exploring the possibility of attacking all fusion sources simultaneously. This allows us for the first time to understand how much security guarantee MSF can fundamentally provide as a general defense strategy for AD perception. We formulate the attack as an optimization problem to generate a physically-realizable, adversarial 3D-printed object that misleads an AD system to fail in detecting it and thus crash into it. To systematically generate such a physical-world attack, we propose a novel attack pipeline that addresses two main design challenges: (1) non-differentiable target camera and LiDAR sensing systems, and (2) non-differentiable cell-level aggregated features popularly used in LiDAR-based AD perception. We evaluate our attack on MSF algorithms included in representative open-source industry-grade AD systems in real-world driving scenarios. Our results show that the attack achieves over 90% success rate across different object types and MSF algorithms. Our attack is also found stealthy, robust to victim positions, transferable across MSF algorithms, and physical-world realizable after being 3D-printed and captured by LiDAR and camera devices. To concretely assess the end-to-end safety impact, we further perform simulation evaluation and show that it can cause a 100% vehicle collision rate for an industry-grade AD system. We also evaluate and discuss defense strategies. 

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5. Optical Lens Attack on Monocular Depth Estimation for Autonomous Driving

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3812541  

   Zhou, Ce; Yan, Qiben; Kent, Daniel; Wang, Guangjing; Ding, Weikang; Zhang, Ziqi; Radha, Hayder (May 2026, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems)

   Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is a pivotal component of vision-based Autonomous Driving (AD) systems, enabling vehicles to estimate the depth of surrounding objects using a single camera image. This estimation guides essential driving decisions, such as braking before an obstacle or changing lanes to avoid collisions. In this paper, we explore vulnerabilities of MDE algorithms in AD systems, presentingLensAttack, a novel physical attack that strategically places optical lenses on the camera of an autonomous vehicle to manipulate the perceived object depths.LensAttackencompasses two attack formats: concave lens attack and convex lens attack, each utilizing different optical lenses to induce false depth perception. We first develop a mathematical model that outlines the parameters of the attack, followed by simulations and real-world evaluations to assess its efficacy on state-of-the-art MDE models. Additionally, we adopt an attack optimization method to further enhance the attack success rate by optimizing the attack focal length. To better evaluate the implications ofLensAttackon AD, we conduct comprehensive end-to-end system simulations using the CARLA platform. The results reveal thatLensAttackcan significantly disrupt the depth estimation processes in AD systems, posing a serious threat to their reliability and safety. Finally, we discuss some potential defense methods to mitigate the effects of the proposed attack. 

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