Can We Use Arbitrary Objects to Attack LiDAR Perception in Autonomous Driving?

As an effective way to acquire accurate information about the driving environment, LiDAR perception has been widely adopted in autonomous driving. The state-of-the-art LiDAR perception systems mainly rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) to achieve good performance. However, DNNs have been demonstrated vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Although there are a few works that study adversarial attacks against LiDAR perception systems, these attacks have some limitations in feasibility, flexibility, and stealthiness when being performed in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we investigate an easier way to perform effective adversarial attacks with high flexibility and good stealthiness against LiDAR perception in autonomous driving. Specifically, we propose a novel attack framework based on which the attacker can identify a few adversarial locations in the physical space. By placing arbitrary objects with reflective surface around these locations, the attacker can easily fool the LiDAR perception systems. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed attack, and the results show that our proposed attack can achieve more than 90% success rate. In addition, our real-world study demonstrates that the proposed attack can be easily performed using only two commercial drones. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first study on the effect of adversarial locations on LiDAR perception models' behaviors, the first investigation on how to attack LiDAR perception systems using arbitrary objects with reflective surface, and the first attack against LiDAR perception systems using commercial drones in physical world. Potential defense strategies are also discussed to mitigate the proposed attacks.