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  1. 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. 
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  2. Automated Lane Centering (ALC) systems are convenient and widely deployed today, but also highly security and safety critical. In this work, we are the first to systematically study the security of state-of-the-art deep learning based ALC systems in their designed operational domains under physical-world adversarial attacks. We formulate the problem with a safetycritical attack goal, and a novel and domain-specific attack vector: dirty road patches. To systematically generate the attack, we adopt an optimization-based approach and overcome domain-specific design challenges such as camera frame interdependencies due to attack-influenced vehicle control, and the lack of objective function design for lane detection models. We evaluate our attack on a production ALC using 80 scenarios from real-world driving traces. The results show that our attack is highly effective with over 97.5% success rates and less than 0.903 sec average success time, which is substantially lower than the average driver reaction time. This attack is also found (1) robust to various real-world factors such as lighting conditions and view angles, (2) general to different model designs, and (3) stealthy from the driver’s view. To understand the safety impacts, we conduct experiments using software-in-the-loop simulation and attack trace injection in a real vehicle. The results show that our attack can cause a 100% collision rate in different scenarios, including when tested with common safety features such as automatic emergency braking. We also evaluate and discuss defenses. 
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  3. Connected vehicle (CV) technologies enable data exchange between vehicles and transportation infrastructure. In a CV environment, traffic signal control systems receive CV trajectory data through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications to make control decisions. Comparing with existing data collection methods (e.g., from loop-detectors), the CV trajectory data provide much richer information, and therefore have great potentials to improve the system performance by reducing total vehicle delay at signalized intersections. However, this connectivity might also bring cyber security concerns. In this paper, we aim to investigate the security problem of CV-based traffic signal control (CV-TSC) systems. Specifically, we focus on evaluating the impact of falsified data attacks on the system performance. A black-box attack scenario, in which the control logic of a CV-TSC system is unavailable to attackers, is considered. A two-step attack model is constructed. In the first step, the attacker tries to learn the control logic using a surrogate model. Based on the surrogate model, in the second step, the attacker launches falsified data attacks to influence the control systems to make sub-optimal control decisions. In the case study, we apply the attack model to an existing CV-TSC system (i.e., I-SIG) and find intersection delay can be significantly increased. Finally, we discuss some promising defense directions. 
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  4. null (Ed.)
    A critical aspect of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is the object detection stage, which is increasingly being performed with sensor fusion models: multimodal 3D object detection models which utilize both 2D RGB image data and 3D data from a LIDAR sensor as inputs. In this work, we perform the first study to analyze the robustness of a high-performance, open source sensor fusion model architecture towards adversarial attacks and challenge the popular belief that the use of additional sensors automatically mitigate the risk of adversarial attacks. We find that despite the use of a LIDAR sensor, the model is vulnerable to our purposefully crafted image-based adversarial attacks including disappearance, universal patch, and spoofing. After identifying the underlying reason, we explore some potential defenses and provide some recommendations for improved sensor fusion models. 
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  5. null (Ed.)
    With the development of the emerging Connected Vehicle (CV) technology, vehicles can wirelessly communicate with traffic infrastructure and other vehicles to exchange safety and mobility information in real time. However, the integrated communication capability inevitably increases the attack surface of vehicles, which can be exploited to cause safety hazard on the road. Thus, it is highly desirable to systematically understand design-level flaws in the current CV network stack as well as in CV applications, and the corresponding security/safety consequences so that these flaws can be proactively discovered and addressed before large-scale deployment. In this paper, we design CVAnalyzer, a system for discovering design-level flaws for availability violations of the CV network stack, as well as quantifying the corresponding security/safety consequences. To achieve this, CVAnalyzer combines the attack discovery capability of a general model checker and the quantitative threat assessment capability of a probabilistic model checker. Using CVAnalyzer, we successfully uncovered 4 new DoS (Denial-of-Service) vulnerabilities of the latest CV network protocols and 14 new DoS vulnerabilities of two CV platoon management protocols. Our quantification results show that these attacks can have as high as 99% success rates, and in the worst case can at least double the delay in packet processing, violating the latency requirement in CV communication.We implemented and validated all attacks in a real-world testbed, and also analyzed the fundamental causes to propose potential solutions. We have reported our findings in the CV network protocols to the IEEE 1609 Working Group, and the group has acknowledged the discovered vulnerabilities and plans to adopt our solutions. 
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  6. The perception module is the key to the security of Autonomous Driving systems. It perceives the environment through sensors to help make safe and correct driving decisions on the road. The localization module is usually considered to be independent of the perception module. However, we discover that the correctness of perception output highly depends on localization due to the widely used Region-of-Interest design adopted in perception. Leveraging this insight, we propose an ROI attack and perform a case study in the traffic light detection in Autonomous Driving systems. We evaluate the ROI attack on a production-grade Autonomous Driving system, named Baidu Apollo, under end-to-end simulation environments. We found our attack is able to make the victim a red light runner or cause denial-of-service with a 100% success rate. 
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  7. 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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  8. null (Ed.)
    For high-level Autonomous Vehicles (AV), localization is highly security and safety critical. One direct threat to it is GPS spoofing, but fortunately, AV systems today predominantly use Multi-Sensor Fusion (MSF) algorithms that are generally believed to have the potential to practically defeat GPS spoofing. However, no prior work has studied whether today’s MSF algorithms are indeed sufficiently secure under GPS spoofing, especially in AV settings. In this work, we perform the first study to fill this critical gap. As the first study, we focus on a production-grade MSF with both design and implementation level representativeness, and identify two AV-specific attack goals, off-road and wrong-way attacks. To systematically understand the security property, we first analyze the upper-bound attack effectiveness, and discover a take-over effect that can fundamentally defeat the MSF design principle. We perform a cause analysis and find that such vulnerability only appears dynamically and non-deterministically. Leveraging this insight, we design FusionRipper, a novel and general attack that opportunistically captures and exploits take-over vulnerabilities. We evaluate it on 6 real-world sensor traces, and find that FusionRipper can achieve at least 97% and 91.3% success rates in all traces for off-road and wrongway attacks respectively. We also find that it is highly robust to practical factors such as spoofing inaccuracies. To improve the practicality, we further design an offline method that can effectively identify attack parameters with over 80% average success rates for both attack goals, with the cost of at most half a day. We also discuss promising defense directions. 
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  9. null (Ed.)
    With the growing trend of the Internet of Things, a large number of wireless OBD-II dongles are developed, which can be simply plugged into vehicles to enable remote functions such as sophisticated vehicle control and status monitoring. However, since these dongles are directly connected with in-vehicle networks, they may open a new over-the-air attack surface for vehicles. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive security analysis on all wireless OBD-II dongles available on Amazon in the US in February 2019, which were 77 in total. To systematically perform the analysis, we design and implement an automated tool DONGLESCOPE that dynamically tests these dongles from all possible attack stages on a real automobile. With DONGLESCOPE, we have identified 5 different types of vulnerabilities, with 4 being newly discovered. Our results reveal that each of the 77 dongles exposes at least two types of these vulnerabilities, which indicates a widespread vulnerability exposure among wireless OBD-II dongles on the market today. To demonstrate the severity, we further construct 4 classes of concrete attacks with a variety of practical implications such as privacy leakage, property theft, and even safety threat. We also discuss the root causes and feasible countermeasures, and have made corresponding responsible disclosure. 
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