A Systematic Study of Physical Sensor Attack Hardness

Physical sensor attacks against robotic vehicles (RV) have become a serious concern due to their prevalence and potential physical threat. However, RV software developers often do not deploy appropriate countermeasures. This hesitance stems from their belief that attackers face substantial challenges when conducting sensor attacks, e.g., nullifying sensor redundancy in hardware and circumventing sensor filters in software. Yet, we discover that attackers can overcome the challenges by fulfilling specific prerequisites and finely tuning attack parameters. The misconceptions that the developers have arisen from a lack of study regarding the level of difficulty attackers face in successfully achieving their attack goals, which we call "attack hardness".In this paper, we examine the hardness of 12 well-known sensor attacks. We first identify the prerequisites required to conduct the attacks successfully. We then quantify the hardness of each attack as how frequent the prerequisites enabling a specific attack are in the real world. To automate this analysis, we introduce RVPROBER, an attack prerequisite analysis framework. RVPROBER discovered that the 12 sensor attacks require, on average, 4.4 prerequisites, highlighting that previous literature has often missed important details required to perform these attacks. By satisfying the identified prerequisites and tuning attack parameters, we increased the number of successful attacks from 6 to 11. Moreover, our analysis showed that an average of 57.08% of actual RV users are vulnerable to sensor attacks. Finally, starting from the identified prerequisites, we analyzed the reasons behind the success of each attack and found previously-unknown root causes, such as design flaws in the RV software’s fail-safe logic.