Zhisheng Hu

Junjie Shen, Ningfei Wang, Ziwen Wan et al.

Autonomous Driving (AD) systems rely on AI components to make safety and correct driving decisions. Unfortunately, today's AI algorithms are known to be generally vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, for such AI component-level vulnerabilities to be semantically impactful at the system level, it needs to address non-trivial semantic gaps both (1) from the system-level attack input spaces to those at AI component level, and (2) from AI component-level attack impacts to those at the system level. In this paper, we define such research space as semantic AI security as opposed to generic AI security. Over the past 5 years, increasingly more research works are performed to tackle such semantic AI security challenges in AD context, which has started to show an exponential growth trend. In this paper, we perform the first systematization of knowledge of such growing semantic AD AI security research space. In total, we collect and analyze 53 such papers, and systematically taxonomize them based on research aspects critical for the security field. We summarize 6 most substantial scientific gaps observed based on quantitative comparisons both vertically among existing AD AI security works and horizontally with security works from closely-related domains. With these, we are able to provide insights and potential future directions not only at the design level, but also at the research goal, methodology, and community levels. To address the most critical scientific methodology-level gap, we take the initiative to develop an open-source, uniform, and extensible system-driven evaluation platform, named PASS, for the semantic AD AI security research community. We also use our implemented platform prototype to showcase the capabilities and benefits of such a platform using representative semantic AD AI attacks.

Ziyuan Zhong, Zhisheng Hu, Shengjian Guo et al.

Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been thriving and widely deployed in recent years. In general, these systems receive sensor data, compute driving decisions, and output control signals to the vehicles. To smooth out the uncertainties brought by sensor outputs, they usually leverage multi-sensor fusion (MSF) to fuse the sensor outputs and produce a more reliable understanding of the surroundings. However, MSF cannot completely eliminate the uncertainties since it lacks the knowledge about which sensor provides the most accurate data and how to optimally integrate the data provided by the sensors. As a result, critical consequences might happen unexpectedly. In this work, we observed that the popular MSF methods in an industry-grade ADAS can mislead the car control and result in serious safety hazards. We define the failures (e.g., car crashes) caused by the faulty MSF as fusion errors and develop a novel evolutionary-based domain-specific search framework, FusED, for the efficient detection of fusion errors. We further apply causality analysis to show that the found fusion errors are indeed caused by the MSF method. We evaluate our framework on two widely used MSF methods in two driving environments. Experimental results show that FusED identifies more than 150 fusion errors. Finally, we provide several suggestions to improve the MSF methods we study.

Zhisheng Hu, Shengjian Guo, Zhenyu Zhong et al.

Simulation-based virtual testing has become an essential step to ensure the safety of autonomous driving systems. Testers need to handcraft the virtual driving scenes and configure various environmental settings like surrounding traffic, weather conditions, etc. Due to the huge amount of configuration possibilities, the human efforts are subject to the inefficiency in detecting flaws in industry-class autonomous driving system. This paper proposes a coverage-driven fuzzing technique to automatically generate diverse configuration parameters to form new driving scenes. Experimental results show that our fuzzing method can significantly reduce the cost in deriving new risky scenes from the initial setup designed by testers. We expect automated fuzzing will become a common practice in virtual testing for autonomous driving systems.

Xusheng Li, Zhisheng Hu, Haizhou Wang et al.

Return-oriented programming (ROP) is a code reuse attack that chains short snippets of existing code to perform arbitrary operations on target machines. Existing detection methods against ROP exhibit unsatisfactory detection accuracy and/or have high runtime overhead. In this paper, we present ROPNN, which innovatively combines address space layout guided disassembly and deep neural networks to detect ROP payloads. The disassembler treats application input data as code pointers and aims to find any potential gadget chains, which are then classified by a deep neural network as benign or malicious. Our experiments show that ROPNN has high detection rate (99.3%) and a very low false positive rate (0.01%). ROPNN successfully detects all of the 100 real-world ROP exploits that are collected in-the-wild, created manually or created by ROP exploit generation tools. Additionally, ROPNN detects all 10 ROP exploits that can bypass Bin-CFI. ROPNN is non-intrusive and does not incur any runtime overhead to the protected program.