Shared Reality: Detecting Stealthy Attacks Against Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), also known as self-driving cars, are becoming more prevalent in our daily lives. AVs rely on sensor information to evaluate their environment and make crucial decisions in real-time, however, new attacks can create false sensor and actuation commands. As technological advancements expand the usage of AVs to perform more complex tasks, it is imperative to secure the integrity of these devices against malicious external tampering. In this paper, we propose a security framework we call Shared Reality, which consists of verifying that sensors perceive the same physical reality. We implement our design on a custom hardware platform that uses the popular Robot Operating System (ROS) software. Our experiments show that AVs utilizing our proposed security framework ensure security with low overhead while performing several autonomous tasks.