Cooperative perception (CP) enhances situational awareness of connected and autonomous vehicles by exchanging and combining messages from multiple agents. While prior work has explored adversarial integrity attacks that degrade detection accuracy, little is known about CP's robustness against attacks on timeliness (or availability), a safety-critical requirement for autonomous driving. In this paper, we present CP-FREEZER, the first latency attack that maximizes the computation delay of CP algorithms by injecting adversarial perturbation via V2V messages. Our attack resolves several unique challenges, including the non-differentiability of point cloud preprocessing, asynchronous knowledge of the victim’s input due to transmission delays, and uses a novel loss function that effectively maximizes the execution time of the CP pipeline. Extensive experiments show that CP-FREEZER increases end-to-end CP latency by over 90×, pushing per-frame processing time beyond 3 seconds with a 100% success rate on our real-world vehicle testbed. Our findings reveal a critical threat to the availability of CP systems, highlighting the urgent need for robust defenses.

Camera-based perception is a central component to the visual perception of autonomous systems. Recent works have investigated latency attacks against perception pipelines, which can lead to a Denial-of-Service against the autonomous system. Unfortunately, these attacks lack real-world applicability, either relying on digital perturbations or requiring large, unscalable, and highly visible patches that cover up the victim's view. In this paper, we propose Detstorm, a novel physically realizable latency attack against camera-based perception. Detstorm uses projector perturbations to cause delays in perception by creating a large number of adversarial objects. These objects are optimized on four objectives to evade filtering by multiple Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) approaches. To maximize the number of created objects in a dynamic physical environment, Detstorm takes a unique greedy approach, segmenting the environment into “zones” containing distinct object classes and maximizing the number of created objects per zone. Detstorm adapts to changes in the environment in real time, recombining perturbation patterns via our zone stitching process into a contiguous, physically projectable image. Evaluations in both simulated and real-world experiments show that Detstorm causes a 506% increase in detected objects on average, delaying perception results by up to 8.1 seconds, and capable of causing physical consequences on real-world autonomous driving systems.