LiDAR Spoofing Meets the New-Gen: Capability Improvements, Broken Assumptions, and New Attack Strategies

LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) is an indispensable sensor for precise long-and wide-range 3D sensing, which directly benefited the recent rapid deployment of autonomous driving (AD).Meanwhile, such a safety-critical application strongly motivates its security research.A recent line of research finds that one can manipulate the LiDAR point cloud and fool object detectors by firing malicious lasers against LiDAR.However, these efforts face 3 critical research gaps: (1) considering only one specific LiDAR (VLP-16); (2) assuming unvalidated attack capabilities; and (3) evaluating object detectors with limited spoofing capability modeling and setup diversity.To fill these critical research gaps, we conduct the first large-scale measurement study on LiDAR spoofing attack capabilities on object detectors with 9 popular LiDARs, covering both first-and new-generation LiDARs, and 3 major types of object detectors trained on 5 different datasets.To facilitate the measurements, we (1) identify spoofer improvements that significantly improve the latest spoofing capability, (2) identify a new object removal attack that overcomes the applicability limitation of the latest method to new-generation LiDARs, and (3) perform novel mathematical modeling for both object injection and removal attacks based on our measurement results.Through this study, we are able to uncover a total of 15 novel findings, including not only completely new ones due to the measurement angle novelty, but also many that can directly challenge the latest understandings in this problem space.We also discuss defenses. I. INTRODUCTION LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) is one of the most innovative sensors in the past decade.By shooting a laser pulse and measuring its reflection, LiDAR can provide a detailed 3D understanding of the surrounding environment.Autonomous Driving (AD) is one of the most benefited applications of the high-speed and high-precision sensing of LiDARs.After LiDAR showed its effectiveness in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge 1, it has been widely recognized as an essential sensor for Level-4 AD and has been adopted in almost all recent robotaxi services (Waymo One 2, Cruise 3) and AD vehicles operating in the US 4,5.While highly beneficial to our everyday life and society, AD is also highly securitycritical as even a small operational error can cause fatal * co-first authors Our improved spoofer is able to show much stronger pattern control capability Our Attack Our Result: Text Pattern Injection Chos Achieved Pattern Our Result: