Secure Perception for Autonomous Vehicles

Todd Humphreys, Aerospace EngineeringCTR Symposium, April 23, 2014

Autonomous Control System Security

The general secure control problem envisions arbitrary manipulation of y and u (e.g, deception and DoS attacks)

2008

Example: Autonomous Ground Vehicles

(1) V2V and V2I security is fairly good, but CRL may be stale (2) Navigation and timing security is poor due to GPS vulnerability(3) High-level “autonomy protocol” may be fragile, hackable

Example: Autonomous Aircraft

Wesson and Humphreys, Scientific American, Nov. 2013

Example: Autonomous Aircraft

Shepard, Bhatti, Humphreys, Fansler, “Evaluation of smart grid and civilian UAV vulnerability to GPS spoofing attacks,” Proc. ION GNSS, Nashville, TN, 2012

Covert post-capture UAV control is possible provided the spoofer can learn the target’s flight pattern

Covert Post-Capture UAV Control

A.J. Kerns, D.P. Shepard, J.A. Bhatti, T.E. Humphreys, "Unmanned Aircraft Capture and Control via GPS Spoofing,“ Journal of Field Robotics, 2014.

Result of GPS hacking attack

V2V and V2I Security

(1) How will unauthenticated messages be handled? (2) How to deal with latency in certificate revocation?(3) Are proposed local ad-hoc cross-checks good enough?(4) Should we give up on privacy?

Cautionary Tale: FAA’s ADS-B is Insecure

It may be too late for ADS-B, but V2V and V2I still have a chance to get security right

radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu