IACR News item: 28 January 2020
Ben Nassi, Dudi Nassi, Raz Ben-Netanel, Yisroel Mirsky, Oleg Drokin, Yuval Elovici
ePrint Report
The absence of deployed vehicular communication systems, which prevents the advanced driving assistance systems
(ADASs) and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous cars to
validate their virtual perception regarding the physical environment surrounding the car with a third party, has been
exploited in various attacks suggested by researchers. Since
the application of these attacks comes with a cost (exposure
of the attackers identity), the delicate exposure vs. application
balance has held, and attacks of this kind have not yet
been encountered in the wild. In this paper, we investigate a
new perceptual challenge that causes the ADASs and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous to consider depthless objects
(phantoms) as real. We show how attackers can exploit this
perceptual challenge to apply phantom attacks and change
the abovementioned balance, without the need to physically
approach the attack scene, by projecting a phantom via a
drone equipped with a portable projector or by presenting a
phantom on a hacked digital billboard that faces the Internet
and is located near roads. We show that the car industry has
not considered this type of attack by demonstrating the attack
on todays most advanced ADAS and autopilot technologies:
Mobileye 630 PRO and the Tesla Model X, HW 2.5; our
experiments show that when presented with various phantoms,
a cars ADAS or autopilot considers the phantoms as real
objects, causing these systems to trigger the brakes, steer into
the lane of oncoming traffic, and issue notifications about
fake road signs. In order to mitigate this attack, we present
a model that analyzes a detected objects context, surface,
and reflected light, which is capable of detecting phantoms
with 0.99 AUC. Finally, we explain why the deployment
of vehicular communication systems might reduce attackers
opportunities to apply phantom attacks but wont eliminate
them.
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