Illusion and Dazzle: Adversarial Optical Channel Exploits Against Lidars for Automotive Applications

With the advancement in computing, sensing, and vehicle electronics, autonomous vehicles are being realized. For autonomous driving, environment perception sensors such as radars, lidars, and vision sensors play core roles as the eyes of a vehicle; therefore, their reliability cannot be compromised. In this work, we present a spoofing by relaying attack, which can not only induce illusions in the lidar output but can also cause the illusions to appear closer than the location of a spoofing device. In a recent work, the former attack is shown to be effective, but the latter one was never shown. Additionally, we present a novel saturation attack against lidars, which can completely incapacitate a lidar from sensing a certain direction. The effectiveness of both the approaches is experimentally verified against Velodyne’s VLP-16.