English

Guardauto: A Decentralized Runtime Protection System for Autonomous Driving

Cryptography and Security 2023-01-31 v1

Abstract

Due to the broad attack surface and the lack of runtime protection, potential safety and security threats hinder the real-life adoption of autonomous vehicles. Although efforts have been made to mitigate some specific attacks, there are few works on the protection of the self-driving system. This paper presents a decentralized self-protection framework called Guardauto to protect the self-driving system against runtime threats. First, Guardauto proposes an isolation model to decouple the self-driving system and isolate its components with a set of partitions. Second, Guardauto provides self-protection mechanisms for each target component, which combines different methods to monitor the target execution and plan adaption actions accordingly. Third, Guardauto provides cooperation among local self-protection mechanisms to identify the root-cause component in the case of cascading failures affecting multiple components. A prototype has been implemented and evaluated on the open-source autonomous driving system Autoware. Results show that Guardauto could effectively mitigate runtime failures and attacks, and protect the control system with acceptable performance overhead.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.12359,
  title  = {Guardauto: A Decentralized Runtime Protection System for Autonomous Driving},
  author = {Kun Cheng and Yuan Zhou and Bihuan Chen and Rui Wang and Yuebin Bai and Yang Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.12359},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:29:11.113Z