SoK: Rethinking Sensor Spoofing Attacks against Robotic Vehicles from a Systematic View

Robotic Vehicles (RVs) have gained great popularity over the past few years. Meanwhile, they are also demonstrated to be vulnerable to sensor spoofing attacks. Although a wealth of research works have presented various attacks, some key questions remain unanswered: are these existing works complete enough to cover all the sensor spoofing threats? If not, how many attacks are not explored, and how difficult is it to realize them? This paper answers the above questions by comprehensively systematizing the knowledge of sensor spoofing attacks against RVs. Our contributions are threefold. (1) We identify seven common attack paths in an RV system pipeline. We categorize and assess existing spoofing attacks from the perspectives of spoofer property, operation, victim characteristic and attack goal. Based on this systematization, we identify 4 interesting insights about spoofing attack designs. (2) We propose a novel action flow model to systematically describe robotic function executions and sensor spoofing vulnerabilities. With this model, we successfully discover 104 spoofing attack vectors, 25 of which have been verified by prior works, while 55 attacks are practical but never considered. (3) We design two novel attack methodologies to verify the feasibility of newly discovered spoofing attack vectors.