arXiv subjects

Qingzhao Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Qingzhao Zhang.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SoK: How Sensor Attacks Disrupt Autonomous Vehicles: An End-to-end Analysis, Challenges, and Missed Threats

Autonomous vehicles, including self-driving cars, ground robots, and drones, rely on multi-modal sensor pipelines for safe operation, yet remain vulnerable to adversarial sensor attacks. A critical gap is the lack of a systematic end-to-end view of how sensor-induced errors traverse interconnected modules to affect the physical world. To address this gap, we provide a comprehensive survey across platforms, sensing modalities, attack methods, and countermeasures. At its core is Systematic Error Propagation Graph (SEPG), a graph-based framework that maps how attacks inject errors, the conditions for their propagation through modules from perception and localization to planning and control, and when they reach physical impact. From this analysis, our study distills 8 key findings that highlight the feasibility constraints of sensor attacks and uncovers 12 previously overlooked attack vectors exploiting inter-module interactions, several of which we validate via proof-of-concept experiments. We further conduct a pilot user study with autonomous vehicle security researchers, showing that SEPG is viewed as a faithful and useful framework for qualitative system-level attack analysis. We also evaluate large language models (LLMs) for generating the analysis, demonstrating the potential of AI-powered automation.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Adversarial Trust Poisoning in Vehicular Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception (CP) enables connected and autonomous vehicles to share sensor data and jointly reason about their environment. To defend against adversaries that fabricate or manipulate shared data, existing systems employ cross-vehicle inconsistency detection and trust estimation, penalizing vehicles whose observations conflict with the majority. In this work, we show that these defenses themselves introduce a new attack surface. We present TrustFlip, a novel attack that weaponizes consistency-based defenses to poison the trust assigned to benign vehicles. Instead of injecting false data into the collaboration pipeline, it deploys physical adversarial objects that are genuine but induce inconsistent observations among benign vehicles. The resulting inconsistencies are misattributed by the defense to the targeted vehicle, causing its trust score to degrade and eventually leading to its downweighting or exclusion from collaboration. Consequently, the system loses reliable sensing contributors, degrading perception capability and potentially inducing safety-critical failures. We evaluate TrustFlip across multiple collaborative perception architectures and defense mechanisms. Our results show that state-of-the-art defenses can be significantly affected: the attack removes the targeted benign vehicle from collaboration in up to 87.7% of scenarios and drops Average Precision (AP) by up to 13%. As an initial mitigation, we introduce TrustReflect, a lightweight self-reflection mechanism that marks disputed regions as uncertain and excludes them from trust evaluation, reducing the attack success rate by 35-100%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Adversarial Calibration Attack on Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on accurate camera-LiDAR calibration for multimodal sensor fusion. In practice, calibration can drift due to vibration, temperature variation, or minor sensor displacement, motivating online calibration algorithms that detect and correct misalignment at runtime while allowing the vehicle to continue operating without a factory visit. Existing AV attacks largely assume correct calibration. We instead identify online sensor calibration as a new attack plane. A corrupted calibration update can persist across subsequent fusion operations, causing system-wide errors that propagate from perception to planning and control. We present Adversarial Calibration Attack (ACA), the first physical attack against camera-LiDAR online calibration. Using a single adversarial poster, ACA first spoofs the miscalibration detector to trigger the calibration process and then steers the calibration estimator toward an incorrect transformation. A unified optimization jointly designs the poster's geometry and texture for both objectives. We evaluate ACA across benchmark datasets, simulation, and physical experiments. On benchmark datasets such as KITTI and nuScenes, ACA induces up to 33.9 degrees mean rotational calibration error, thereby severely degrading object detection. In the CARLA simulator, the attack causes a collision when the corrupted calibration is accepted in vulnerable scenarios crafted by the attacker. On a real Husky robot, a printed adversarial poster successfully reproduces the calibration error. These results demonstrate that online calibration is a practical and safety-critical attack surface for AVs.

cs.RO↗