STOP! Camera Spoofing via the in-Vehicle IP Network

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how attackers can manipulate in-vehicle IP network communications to inject fake images into ADAS camera feeds, potentially causing the vehicle to stop, and proposes active defense mechanisms to mitigate such spoofing attacks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel attack exploiting IP-based camera communication in vehicles and proposes a width-varying defense mechanism to detect and prevent such spoofing attacks.

Findings

Passive detectors are effective against naive adversaries.

Sophisticated adversaries can evade passive detection.

Width-varying defense significantly reduces successful attack duration.

Abstract

Autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) rely on cameras to control the driving. In many prior approaches an attacker aiming to stop the vehicle had to send messages on the specialized and better-defended CAN bus. We suggest an easier alternative: manipulate the IP-based network communication between the camera and the ADAS logic, inject fake images of stop signs or red lights into the video stream, and let the ADAS stop the car safely. We created an attack tool that successfully exploits the GigE Vision protocol. Then we analyze two classes of passive anomaly detectors to identify such attacks: protocol-based detectors and video-based detectors. We implemented multiple detectors of both classes and evaluated them on data collected from our test vehicle and also on data from the public BDD corpus. Our results show that such detectors are effective against naive adversaries, but sophisticated adversaries can evade detection. Finally, we propose a novel class of active defense mechanisms that randomly adjust camera parameters during the video transmission, and verify that the received images obey the requested adjustments. Within this class we focus on a specific implementation, the width-varying defense, which randomly modifies the width of every frame. Beyond its function as an anomaly detector, this defense is also a protective measure against certain attacks: by distorting injected image patches it prevents their recognition by the ADAS logic. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the width-varying defense through theoretical analysis and by an extensive evaluation of several types of attack in a wide range of realistic road driving conditions. The best the attack was able to achieve against this defense was injecting a stop sign for a duration of 0.2 seconds, with a success probability of 0.2%, whereas stopping a vehicle requires about 2.5 seconds.