Case Studies

Whether it is an infrastructure sensor detecting vehicles at a stoplight or a stopped vehicle sensing oncoming traffic prior to pulling out of a parking lot, accurately detecting one's surroundings is critical to safety on the roads. To showcase how a malicious actor might compromise such sensors, we present case studies where a stationary attacker is set up to attack a stationary victim.

When driving, automotive radar sensors are used my many safety-critical systems including forward collision warning (FCW) and blind spot monitoring (BSM) systems. Moving forward, radars are being utilized for various advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) including automatic cruise control (ACC) and other autonomous driving applications. Regardless of the application, it is critical that the radars in these systems accurately sense their environment. In these case studies, we present scenarios where a moving attacker attacks a moving victim.

Our black-box attack architecture is designed to attack unsecured victim radars that have consistent chirp slopes, chirp periods, and frame periods. However, it is possible that some move advanced victims will employ randomization techniques in an attempt to defend against our attacks. In these case studies, we show how our proposed architecture can detect when victims are employing such a defense and launch an optimized jamming attack to still prevent a radar from accurately sensing the world around it.