MadRadar: A Black-Box Physical Layer Attack Framework on mmWave Automotive FMCW Radars

Abstract

Frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) millimeter-wave (mmWave) radars play a critical role in many of the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) featured on today’s vehicles. While previous works have demonstrated (only) successful false-positive spoofing attacks against these sensors, all but one assumed that an attacker had the runtime knowledge of the victim radar’s configuration. In this work, we introduce MadRadar, a general black-box radar attack framework for automotive mmWave FMCW radars capable of estimating the victim radar’s configuration in real-time, and then executing an attack based on the estimates. We evaluate the impact of such attacks maliciously manipulating a victim radar’s point cloud, and show the novel ability to effectively ‘add’ (i.e., false positive attacks), ‘remove’ (i.e., false negative attacks), or ‘move’ (i.e., translation attacks) object detections from a victim vehicle’s scene. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of our attacks on real-world case studies performed using a realtime physical prototype on a software-defined radio platform.

Publication
In Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024
Zhenzhou (Tom) Qi
Zhenzhou (Tom) Qi
Ph.D. Candidiate at Duke University

My research interests include vRAN, Heterogeneous Computing and Computer Networks.