skip to main content


Title: PASS: A System-Driven Evaluation Platform for Autonomous Driving Safety and Security
Safety and security play critical roles for the success of Autonomous Driving (AD) systems. Since AD systems heavily rely on AI components, the safety and security research of such components has also received great attention in recent years. While it is widely recognized that AI component-level (mis)behavior does not necessarily lead to AD system-level impacts, most of existing work still only adopts component-level evaluation. To fill such critical scientific methodology-level gap from component-level to real system-level impact, a system-driven evaluation platform jointly constructed by the community could be the solution. In this paper, we present PASS (Platform for Auto-driving Safety and Security), a system-driven evaluation prototype based on simulation. By sharing our platform building concept and preliminary efforts, we hope to call on the community to build a uniform and extensible platform to make AI safety and security work sufficiently meaningful at the system level.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1929771 1932464 2145493
NSF-PAR ID:
10359464
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
NDSS Workshop on Automotive and Autonomous Vehicle Security (AutoSec)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. 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. 
    more » « less
  2. We are witnessing a race to meet the ever-growing computation requirements of emerging AI applications to provide perception and control in autonomous vehicles — e.g., self-driving cars and UAVs. To remain competitive, vendors are packing more processing units (CPUs, programmable logic, GPUs, and hardware accelerators) into next-generation multiprocessor systems-on-a-chip (MPSoC). As a result, modern embedded platforms are achieving new heights in peak computational capacity. Unfortunately, however, the collateral and inevitable increase in complexity represents a major obstacle for the development of correct-by-design safety-critical real-time applications. Due to the ever-growing gap between fast-paced hardware evolution and comparatively slower evolution of real-time operating systems (RTOS), there is a need for real-time oriented full-platform management frameworks to complement traditional RTOS designs. In this work, we propose one such framework, namely the X-Stream framework, for the definition, synthesis, and analysis of real-time workloads targeting state-of-the-art accelerator-augmented embedded platforms. Our X-Stream framework is designed around two cardinal principles. First, computation and data movements are orchestrated to achieve predictability by design. For this purpose, iterative computation over large data chunks is divided into subsequent segments. These segments are then streamed leveraging the three-phase execution model (load, execute and unload). Second, the framework is workflow-centric: system designers can specify their workflow and the necessary code for workflow orchestration is automatically generated. In addition to automating the deployment of user-defined hardware-accelerated workloads, X-Stream supports the deployment of some computation segments on traditional CPUs. Finally, X-Stream allows the definition of real-time partitions. Each partition groups applications belonging to the same criticality level and that share the same set of hardware resources, with support for preemptive priority-driven scheduling. Conversely, freedom from interference for applications deployed in different partitions is guaranteed by design. We provide a full-system implementation that includes RTOS integration and showcase the proposed X-Stream framework on a Xilinx Ultrascale+ platform by focusing on a matrix-multiplication and addition kernel use-case. 
    more » « less
  3. In high-level Autonomous Driving (AD) systems, behavioral planning is in charge of making high-level driving decisions such as cruising and stopping, and thus highly securitycritical. In this work, we perform the first systematic study of semantic security vulnerabilities specific to overly-conservative AD behavioral planning behaviors, i.e., those that can cause failed or significantly-degraded mission performance, which can be critical for AD services such as robo-taxi/delivery. We call them semantic Denial-of-Service (DoS) vulnerabilities, which we envision to be most generally exposed in practical AD systems due to the tendency for conservativeness to avoid safety incidents. To achieve high practicality and realism, we assume that the attacker can only introduce seemingly-benign external physical objects to the driving environment, e.g., off-road dumped cardboard boxes. To systematically discover such vulnerabilities, we design PlanFuzz, a novel dynamic testing approach that addresses various problem-specific design challenges. Specifically, we propose and identify planning invariants as novel testing oracles, and design new input generation to systematically enforce problemspecific constraints for attacker-introduced physical objects. We also design a novel behavioral planning vulnerability distance metric to effectively guide the discovery. We evaluate PlanFuzz on 3 planning implementations from practical open-source AD systems, and find that it can effectively discover 9 previouslyunknown semantic DoS vulnerabilities without false positives. We find all our new designs necessary, as without each design, statistically significant performance drops are generally observed. We further perform exploitation case studies using simulation and real-vehicle traces. We discuss root causes and potential fixes. 
    more » « less
  4. Both energy-efficiency and real-time performance are critical requirements in many embedded systems applications such as self-driving car, robotic system, disaster response, and security/safety control. These systems entail a myriad of real-time tasks, where each task itself is a parallel task that can utilize multiple computing units at the same time. Driven by the increasing demand for parallel tasks, multi-core embedded processors are inevitably evolving to many-core. Existing work on real-time parallel tasks mostly focused on real-time scheduling without addressing energy consumption. In this paper, we address hard real-time scheduling of parallel tasks while minimizing their CPU energy consumption on multicore embedded systems. Each task is represented as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with nodes indicating different threads of execution and edges indicating their dependencies. Our technique is to determine the execution speeds of the nodes of the DAGs to minimize the overall energy consumption while meeting all task deadlines. It incorporates a frequency optimization engine and the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) scheme into the classical real-time scheduling policies (both federated and global) and makes them energy-aware. The contributions of this paper thus include the first energy-aware online federated scheduling and also the first energy-aware global scheduling of DAGs. Evaluation using synthetic workload through simulation shows that our energy-aware real-time scheduling policies can achieve up to 68% energy-saving compared to classical (energy-unaware) policies. We have also performed a proof of concept system evaluation using physical hardware demonstrating the energy efficiency through our proposed approach. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    The DeepLearningEpilepsyDetectionChallenge: design, implementation, andtestofanewcrowd-sourced AIchallengeecosystem Isabell Kiral*, Subhrajit Roy*, Todd Mummert*, Alan Braz*, Jason Tsay, Jianbin Tang, Umar Asif, Thomas Schaffter, Eren Mehmet, The IBM Epilepsy Consortium◊ , Joseph Picone, Iyad Obeid, Bruno De Assis Marques, Stefan Maetschke, Rania Khalaf†, Michal Rosen-Zvi† , Gustavo Stolovitzky† , Mahtab Mirmomeni† , Stefan Harrer† * These authors contributed equally to this work † Corresponding authors: rkhalaf@us.ibm.com, rosen@il.ibm.com, gustavo@us.ibm.com, mahtabm@au1.ibm.com, sharrer@au.ibm.com ◊ Members of the IBM Epilepsy Consortium are listed in the Acknowledgements section J. Picone and I. Obeid are with Temple University, USA. T. Schaffter is with Sage Bionetworks, USA. E. Mehmet is with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. All other authors are with IBM Research in USA, Israel and Australia. Introduction This decade has seen an ever-growing number of scientific fields benefitting from the advances in machine learning technology and tooling. More recently, this trend reached the medical domain, with applications reaching from cancer diagnosis [1] to the development of brain-machine-interfaces [2]. While Kaggle has pioneered the crowd-sourcing of machine learning challenges to incentivise data scientists from around the world to advance algorithm and model design, the increasing complexity of problem statements demands of participants to be expert data scientists, deeply knowledgeable in at least one other scientific domain, and competent software engineers with access to large compute resources. People who match this description are few and far between, unfortunately leading to a shrinking pool of possible participants and a loss of experts dedicating their time to solving important problems. Participation is even further restricted in the context of any challenge run on confidential use cases or with sensitive data. Recently, we designed and ran a deep learning challenge to crowd-source the development of an automated labelling system for brain recordings, aiming to advance epilepsy research. A focus of this challenge, run internally in IBM, was the development of a platform that lowers the barrier of entry and therefore mitigates the risk of excluding interested parties from participating. The challenge: enabling wide participation With the goal to run a challenge that mobilises the largest possible pool of participants from IBM (global), we designed a use case around previous work in epileptic seizure prediction [3]. In this “Deep Learning Epilepsy Detection Challenge”, participants were asked to develop an automatic labelling system to reduce the time a clinician would need to diagnose patients with epilepsy. Labelled training and blind validation data for the challenge were generously provided by Temple University Hospital (TUH) [4]. TUH also devised a novel scoring metric for the detection of seizures that was used as basis for algorithm evaluation [5]. In order to provide an experience with a low barrier of entry, we designed a generalisable challenge platform under the following principles: 1. No participant should need to have in-depth knowledge of the specific domain. (i.e. no participant should need to be a neuroscientist or epileptologist.) 2. No participant should need to be an expert data scientist. 3. No participant should need more than basic programming knowledge. (i.e. no participant should need to learn how to process fringe data formats and stream data efficiently.) 4. No participant should need to provide their own computing resources. In addition to the above, our platform should further • guide participants through the entire process from sign-up to model submission, • facilitate collaboration, and • provide instant feedback to the participants through data visualisation and intermediate online leaderboards. The platform The architecture of the platform that was designed and developed is shown in Figure 1. The entire system consists of a number of interacting components. (1) A web portal serves as the entry point to challenge participation, providing challenge information, such as timelines and challenge rules, and scientific background. The portal also facilitated the formation of teams and provided participants with an intermediate leaderboard of submitted results and a final leaderboard at the end of the challenge. (2) IBM Watson Studio [6] is the umbrella term for a number of services offered by IBM. Upon creation of a user account through the web portal, an IBM Watson Studio account was automatically created for each participant that allowed users access to IBM's Data Science Experience (DSX), the analytics engine Watson Machine Learning (WML), and IBM's Cloud Object Storage (COS) [7], all of which will be described in more detail in further sections. (3) The user interface and starter kit were hosted on IBM's Data Science Experience platform (DSX) and formed the main component for designing and testing models during the challenge. DSX allows for real-time collaboration on shared notebooks between team members. A starter kit in the form of a Python notebook, supporting the popular deep learning libraries TensorFLow [8] and PyTorch [9], was provided to all teams to guide them through the challenge process. Upon instantiation, the starter kit loaded necessary python libraries and custom functions for the invisible integration with COS and WML. In dedicated spots in the notebook, participants could write custom pre-processing code, machine learning models, and post-processing algorithms. The starter kit provided instant feedback about participants' custom routines through data visualisations. Using the notebook only, teams were able to run the code on WML, making use of a compute cluster of IBM's resources. The starter kit also enabled submission of the final code to a data storage to which only the challenge team had access. (4) Watson Machine Learning provided access to shared compute resources (GPUs). Code was bundled up automatically in the starter kit and deployed to and run on WML. WML in turn had access to shared storage from which it requested recorded data and to which it stored the participant's code and trained models. (5) IBM's Cloud Object Storage held the data for this challenge. Using the starter kit, participants could investigate their results as well as data samples in order to better design custom algorithms. (6) Utility Functions were loaded into the starter kit at instantiation. This set of functions included code to pre-process data into a more common format, to optimise streaming through the use of the NutsFlow and NutsML libraries [10], and to provide seamless access to the all IBM services used. Not captured in the diagram is the final code evaluation, which was conducted in an automated way as soon as code was submitted though the starter kit, minimising the burden on the challenge organising team. Figure 1: High-level architecture of the challenge platform Measuring success The competitive phase of the "Deep Learning Epilepsy Detection Challenge" ran for 6 months. Twenty-five teams, with a total number of 87 scientists and software engineers from 14 global locations participated. All participants made use of the starter kit we provided and ran algorithms on IBM's infrastructure WML. Seven teams persisted until the end of the challenge and submitted final solutions. The best performing solutions reached seizure detection performances which allow to reduce hundred-fold the time eliptologists need to annotate continuous EEG recordings. Thus, we expect the developed algorithms to aid in the diagnosis of epilepsy by significantly shortening manual labelling time. Detailed results are currently in preparation for publication. Equally important to solving the scientific challenge, however, was to understand whether we managed to encourage participation from non-expert data scientists. Figure 2: Primary occupation as reported by challenge participants Out of the 40 participants for whom we have occupational information, 23 reported Data Science or AI as their main job description, 11 reported being a Software Engineer, and 2 people had expertise in Neuroscience. Figure 2 shows that participants had a variety of specialisations, including some that are in no way related to data science, software engineering, or neuroscience. No participant had deep knowledge and experience in data science, software engineering and neuroscience. Conclusion Given the growing complexity of data science problems and increasing dataset sizes, in order to solve these problems, it is imperative to enable collaboration between people with differences in expertise with a focus on inclusiveness and having a low barrier of entry. We designed, implemented, and tested a challenge platform to address exactly this. Using our platform, we ran a deep-learning challenge for epileptic seizure detection. 87 IBM employees from several business units including but not limited to IBM Research with a variety of skills, including sales and design, participated in this highly technical challenge. 
    more » « less