Self-driving cars, or Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), are increasingly becoming an integral part of our daily life. About 50 corporations are actively working on AVs, including large companies such as Google, Ford, and Intel. Some AVs are already operating on public roads, with at least one unfortunate fatality recently on record. As a result, understanding bugs in AVs is critical for ensuring their security, safety, robustness, and correctness. While previous studies have focused on a variety of domains (e.g., numerical software; machine learning; and error-handling, concurrency, and performance bugs) to investigate bug characteristics, AVs have not been studied in a similar manner. Recently, two software systems for AVs, Baidu Apollo and Autoware, have emerged as frontrunners in the opensource community and have been used by large companies and governments (e.g., Lincoln, Volvo, Ford, Intel, Hitachi, LG, and the US Department of Transportation). From these two leading AV software systems, this paper describes our investigation of 16,851 commits and 499 AV bugs and introduces our classification of those bugs into 13 root causes, 20 bug symptoms, and 18 categories of software components those bugs often affect. We identify 16 major findings from our study and draw broader lessons from them to guidemore »
AVGuardian: Detecting and Mitigating Publish-Subscribe Overprivilege for Autonomous Vehicle Systems
Autonomous vehicle (AV) software systems are emerging to enable rapidly developed self-driving functionalities. Since such systems are responsible for safety-critical decisions, it is necessary to secure them in face of cyber attacks. Through an empirical study of representative AV software systems Baidu Apollo and Autoware, we discover a common over-privilege problem with the publish-subscribe communication model widely adopted by AV systems: due to the coarse-grained message design for the publish-subscribe communication, some message fields are over-granted with
publish/subscribe permissions. To comply with the least-privilege principle and reduce the attack surface resulting from such problem, we argue that the publish/subscribe permissions should be defined and enforced at the granularity of message fields instead of messages.
To systematically address such publish-subscribe over-privilege problems, we present AVGuardian, a system that includes (1) a static analysis tool that detects over-privilege
instances in AV software and generates the corresponding access control policies at the message field granularity, and (2) a low-overhead, module-transparent, runtime publish/subscribe permission policy enforcement mechanism to perform online policy violation detection and prevention. Using our detection tool, we are able to automatically detect 581 over-privilege instances in total in Baidu Apollo. To demonstrate the severity, we further constructed several concrete exploits that can lead to more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1929771
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10297459
- Journal Name:
- IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P)
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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