Search

Multi-agent, collaborative sensor fusion is a vital component of a multi-national intelligence toolkit. In safety-critical and/or contested environments, adversaries may infiltrate and compromise a number of agents. We analyze state of the art multi-target tracking algorithms under this compromised agent threat model. We prove that the track existence probability test ("track score") is significantly vulnerable to even small numbers of adversaries. To add security awareness, we design a trust estimation framework using hierarchical Bayesian updating. Our framework builds beliefs of trust on tracks and agents by mapping sensor measurements to trust pseudomeasurements (PSMs) and incorporating prior trust beliefs in a Bayesian context. In case studies, our trust estimation algorithm accurately estimates the trustworthiness of tracks/agents, subject to observability limitations.

Recent advancements in assured autonomy have brought autonomous vehicles (AVs) closer to fruition. Despite strong evidence that multi-sensor, multi-agent (MSMA) systems can yield substantial improvements in the safety and security of AVs, there exists no unified framework for developing and testing representative MSMA configurations. Using the recently-released autonomy platform, AVstack, this work proposes a new framework for datasets, models, and algorithms in MSMA autonomy. Instead of releasing a single dataset, we deploy a dataset generation pipeline capable of generating unlimited volumes of ground-truth-labeled MSMA perception data. The data derive from cameras (semantic segmentation, RGB, depth), LiDAR, and radar, and are sourced from ground-vehicles and, for the first time, infrastructure platforms. Pipelining generating labeled MSMA data along with AVstack's third-party integrations defines a model training framework that allows training multi-sensor perception for vehicle and infrastructure applications. We provide the framework and pretrained models open-source. Finally, the dataset and model training pipelines culminate in insightful multi-agent case studies. While previous works used specific ego-centric multi-agent designs, our framework considers the collaborative autonomy space as a network of noisy, time-correlated sensors. Within this environment, we quantify the impact of the network topology and data fusion pipeline on an agent's situational awareness.

Leading autonomous vehicle (AV) platforms and testing infrastructures are, unfortunately, proprietary and closed-source. Thus, it is difficult to evaluate how well safety-critical AVs perform and how safe they truly are. Similarly, few platforms exist for much-needed multi-agent analysis. To provide a starting point for analysis of sensor fusion and collaborative & distributed sensing, we design an accessible, modular sensing platform with AVstack. We build collaborative and distributed camera-radar fusion algorithms and demonstrate an evaluation ecosystem of AV datasets, physics-based simulators, and hardware in the physical world. This three-part ecosystem enables testing next-generation configurations that are prohibitively challenging in existing development platforms.

What happens to an autonomous vehicle (AV) if its data are adversarially compromised? Prior security studies have addressed this question through mostly unrealistic threat models, with limited practical relevance, such as white-box adversarial learning or nanometer-scale laser aiming and spoofing. With growing evidence that cyber threats pose real, imminent danger to AVs and cyber-physical systems (CPS) in general, we present and evaluate a novel AV threat model: a cyber-level attacker capable of disrupting sensor data but lacking any situational awareness. We demonstrate that even though the attacker has minimal knowledge and only access to raw data from a single sensor (i.e., LiDAR), she can design several attacks that critically compromise perception and tracking in multi-sensor AVs. To mitigate vulnerabilities and advance secure architectures in AVs, we introduce two improvements for security-aware fusion: a probabilistic data-asymmetry monitor and a scalable track-to-track fusion of 3D LiDAR and monocular detections (T2T-3DLM); we demonstrate that the approaches significantly reduce attack effectiveness. To support objective safety and security evaluations in AVs, we release our security evaluation platform, AVsec, which is built on security-relevant metrics to benchmark AVs on gold-standard longitudinal AV datasets and AV simulators.

Pioneers of autonomous vehicles (AVs) promised to revolutionize the driving experience and driving safety. However, milestones in AVs have materialized slower than forecast. Two culprits are (1) the lack of verifiability of proposed state-of-the-art AV components, and (2) stagnation of pursuing next-level evaluations, e.g., vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and multi-agent collaboration. In part, progress has been hampered by: the large volume of software in AVs, the multiple disparate conventions, the difficulty of testing across datasets and simulators, and the inflexibility of state-of-the-art AV components. To address these challenges, we present AVstack, an open-source, reconfigurable software platform for AV design, implementation, test, and analysis. AVstack solves the validation problem by enabling first-of-a-kind trade studies on datasets and physics-based simulators. AVstack solves the stagnation problem as a reconfigurable AV platform built on dozens of open-source AV components in a high-level programming language. We demonstrate the power of AVstack through longitudinal testing across multiple benchmark datasets and V2I-collaboration case studies that explore trade-offs of designing multi-sensor, multi-agent algorithms.

Recent high-profile incidents have exposed security risks in control systems. Particularly important and safety-critical modules for security analysis are estimation and control (E&C). Prior works have analyzed the security of E&C for linear, time-invariant systems; however, there are few analyses of nonlinear systems despite their broad use. In an effort to facilitate identifying vulnerabilities in control systems, in this work we establish a class of optimal attacks on nonlinear E&C. Specifically, we define two attack objectives and illustrate that realizing the optimal attacks against the widely-adopted extended Kalman filter with industry-standard $\chi^2$ anomaly detection is equivalent to solving convex quadratically-constrained quadratic programs. Given an appropriate information model for the attacker (i.e.,~a specified amount of attacker knowledge), we provide practical relaxations on the optimal attacks to allow for their computation at runtime. We also show that the difference between the optimal and relaxed attacks is bounded. Finally, we illustrate the use of the introduced attack designs on a case-study.

To enable safe and reliable decision-making, autonomous vehicles (AVs) feed sensor data to perception algorithms to understand the environment. Sensor fusion with multi-frame tracking is becoming increasingly popular for detecting 3D objects. Thus, in this work, we perform an analysis of camera-LiDAR fusion, in the AV context, under LiDAR spoofing attacks. Recently, LiDAR-only perception was shown vulnerable to LiDAR spoofing attacks; however, we demonstrate these attacks are not capable of disrupting camera-LiDAR fusion. We then define a novel, context-aware attack: frustum attack, and show that out of 8 widely used perception algorithms - across 3 architectures of LiDAR-only and 3 architectures of camera-LiDAR fusion - all are significantly vulnerable to the frustum attack. In addition, we demonstrate that the frustum attack is stealthy to existing defenses against LiDAR spoofing as it preserves consistencies between camera and LiDAR semantics. Finally, we show that the frustum attack can be exercised consistently over time to form stealthy longitudinal attack sequences, compromising the tracking module and creating adverse outcomes on end-to-end AV control.