Achieving the Safety and Security of the End-to-End AV Pipeline

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of autonomous vehicle safety and security research, highlighting gaps, challenges, and future directions across various technical areas to guide future efforts.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of AV safety and security research, identifying key problems, evaluating existing work, and proposing future research questions.

Findings

Lack of common evaluation criteria hampers progress.

Physical attacks on perception systems are well-studied, defenses less so.

Interaction of different AV safety issues remains underexplored.

Abstract

In the current landscape of autonomous vehicle (AV) safety and security research, there are multiple isolated problems being tackled by the community at large. Due to the lack of common evaluation criteria, several important research questions are at odds with one another. For instance, while much research has been conducted on physical attacks deceiving AV perception systems, there is often inadequate investigations on working defenses and on the downstream effects of safe vehicle control. This paper provides a thorough description of the current state of AV safety and security research. We provide individual sections for the primary research questions that concern this research area, including AV surveillance, sensor system reliability, security of the AV stack, algorithmic robustness, and safe environment interaction. We wrap up the paper with a discussion of the issues that concern the interactions of these separate problems. At the conclusion of each section, we propose future research questions that still lack conclusive answers. This position article will serve as an entry point to novice and veteran researchers seeking to partake in this research domain.