PLA-LiDAR: Physical Laser Attacks against LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Vehicle

Autonomous vehicles and robots increasingly exploit LiDAR-based 3D object detection systems to detect obstacles in environment. Correct detection and classification are important to ensure safe driving. Though existing work has demonstrated the feasibility of manipulating point clouds to spoof 3D object detectors, most of the attempts are conducted digitally. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of physically fooling LiDAR-based 3D object detection by injecting adversarial point clouds using lasers. First, we develop a laser transceiver that can inject up to 4200 points, which is 20 times more than prior work, and can measure the scanning cycle of victim LiDARs to schedule the spoofing laser signals. By designing a control signal method that converts the coordinates of point clouds to control signals and an adversarial point cloud optimization method with physical constraints of LiDARs and attack capabilities, we manage to inject spoofing point cloud with desired point cloud shapes into the victim LiDAR physically. We can launch four types of attacks, i.e., naive hiding, record-based creating, optimization-based hiding, and optimization-based creating. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our attacks against two commercial LiDAR and three detectors. We also discuss defense strategies at the sensor and AV system levels.