A Human-in-the-Middle Attack against Object Detection Systems

Object detection systems using deep learning models have become increasingly popular in robotics thanks to the rising power of CPUs and GPUs in embedded systems.However, these models are susceptible to adversarial attacks.While some attacks are limited by strict assumptions on access to the detection system, we propose a novel hardware attack inspired by Manin-the-Middle attacks in cryptography.This attack generates a Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAP) and injects the perturbation between the USB camera and the detection system via a hardware attack.Besides, prior research is misled by an evaluation metric that measures the model accuracy rather than the attack performance.In combination with our proposed evaluation metrics, we significantly increased the strength of adversarial perturbations.These findings raise serious concerns for applications of deep learning models in safety-critical systems, such as autonomous driving.Impact Statement-Advancements in deep neural networks have ushered in a new era of robotics, characterized by intelligent robots with a comprehensive understanding of the environment, thanks to deep learning models.However, it is no more a secret that deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks.Besides existing digital and physical attacks, we introduce a novel 'Human-in-the-Middle' hardware attack that injects digital perturbation into the physical sensor.Our research opens up new possibilities for adversarial attacks, and we hope to embrace deep learning models securely for robotic applications.