Recent research shows that adversarial patches can attack object detectors in camera-based perception for Autonomous Driving (AD). However, camera-based perception includes more than object detection; it also involves Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), which enhances robustness by requiring consistent detection across multiple frames before affecting tracking and thus, driving decisions. This makes attacks on object detection alone less effective. To attack such robust systems, a digital hijacking attack has been proposed, aiming to induce dangerous scenarios such as collisions. However, this attack has limited effectiveness, especially in the physical world.

In Autonomous Driving (AD), real-time perception is a critical component responsible for detecting surrounding objects to ensure safe driving. While researchers have extensively explored the integrity of AD perception due to its safety and security implications, the aspect of availability (real-time performance) or latency has received limited attention. Existing works on latency-based attack have focused mainly on object detection, i.e., a component in camera-based AD perception, overlooking the entire camera-based AD perception, which hinders them to achieve effective system-level effects, such as vehicle crashes. In this paper, we propose SlowTrack, a novel framework for generating adversarial attacks to increase the execution time of camera-based AD perception. We propose a novel two-stage attack strategy along with the three new loss function designs. Our evaluation is conducted on four popular camera-based AD perception pipelines, and the results demonstrate that SlowTrack significantly outperforms existing latency-based attacks while maintaining comparable imperceptibility levels. Furthermore, we perform the evaluation on Baidu Apollo, an industry-grade full-stack AD system, and LGSVL, a production-grade AD simulator, with two scenarios to compare the system-level effects of SlowTrack and existing attacks. Our evaluation results show that the system-level effects can be significantly improved, i.e., the vehicle crash rate of SlowTrack is around 95% on average while existing works only have around 30%.

Denoising probabilistic diffusion models have shown breakthrough performance to generate more photo-realistic images or human-level illustrations than the prior models such as GANs. This high image-generation capability has stimulated the creation of many downstream applications in various areas. However, we find that this technology is actually a double-edged sword: we identify a new type of attack, called the Natural Denoising Diffusion (NDD) attack based on the finding that state-of-the-art deep neural network (DNN) models still hold their prediction even if we intentionally remove their robust features, which are essential to the human visual system (HVS), through text prompts. The NDD attack shows a significantly high capability to generate low-cost, model-agnostic, and transferable adversarial attacks by exploiting the natural attack capability in diffusion models. To systematically evaluate the risk of the NDD attack, we perform a large-scale empirical study with our newly created dataset, the Natural Denoising Diffusion Attack (NDDA) dataset. We evaluate the natural attack capability by answering 6 research questions. Through a user study, we find that it can achieve an 88% detection rate while being stealthy to 93% of human subjects; we also find that the non-robust features embedded by diffusion models contribute to the natural attack capability. To confirm the model-agnostic and transferable attack capability, we perform the NDD attack against the Tesla Model 3 and find that 73% of the physically printed attacks can be detected as stop signs. Our hope is that the study and dataset can help our community be aware of the risks in diffusion models and facilitate further research toward robust DNN models.

The rapid advancement of edge and cloud computing platforms, vehicular ad-hoc networks, and machine learning techniques have brought both opportunities and challenges for next-generation connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). On the one hand, these technologies can enable vehicles to leverage more computing power from edge and cloud servers and to share information with each other and surrounding infrastructures for better situation awareness and more intelligent decision making. On the other hand, the more distributed computing process and the wireless nature of V2X (vehicle-to-everything) communication expose vulnerabilities to various disturbances and attacks. In this paper, we discuss the security and safety challenges for edge- and cloud-enabled CAVs, particularly when they are under environment interferences, execution errors, and malicious attacks, and we will introduce our recent work and future directions in developing system-driven, end-to-end methodologies and tools to address these challenges and ensure system resiliency under uncertainties.

In autonomous driving (AD), accurate perception is indispensable to achieving safe and secure driving. Due to its safety-criticality, the security of AD perception has been widely studied. Among different attacks on AD perception, the physical adversarial object evasion attacks are especially severe. However, we find that all existing literature only evaluates their attack effect at the targeted AI component level but not at the system level, i.e., with the entire system semantics and context such as the full AD pipeline. Thereby, this raises a critical research question: can these existing researches effectively achieve system-level attack effects (e.g., traffic rule violations) in the real-world AD context? In this work, we conduct the first measurement study on whether and how effectively the existing designs can lead to system-level effects, especially for the STOP sign-evasion attacks due to their popularity and severity. Our evaluation results show that all the representative prior works cannot achieve any system-level effects. We observe two design limitations in the prior works: 1) physical model-inconsistent object size distribution in pixel sampling and 2) lack of vehicle plant model and AD system model consideration. Then, we propose SysAdv, a novel system-driven attack design in the AD context and our evaluation results show that the system-level effects can be significantly improved, i.e., the violation rate increases by around 70%.

In Autonomous Driving (AD) systems, perception is both security and safety-critical. Among different attacks on AD perception, object-hiding adversarial attack is one of the most critical ones due to the direct impact on safety-critical driving decisions such as collision avoidance. However, all of the prior works on physical object-hiding adversarial attacks only study the security of the AI component alone rather than with the entire AD system pipeline with closed-loop control. This thus inevitably raises a critical research question: can these prior works actually achieve system-level effects (e.g., vehicle collisions, traffic rule violation) under real-world AD settings with closed-loop control?

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 camera-or 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.