Pritam Dash, Guanpeng Li, Zitao Chen, Mehdi Karimibiuki, Karthik Pattabiraman. To appear in the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC). [ PDF (coming soon) ]
This paper is an extended version of our conference paper.
Abstract: Robotic Vehicles (RV) rely extensively on sensor inputs to operate autonomously. Physical attacks such as sensor tampering and spoofing can feed erroneous sensor measurements to deviate RVs from their course and result in mission failures. In this paper, we present a Feed-Forward Controller based framework for automatically recovering RVs from physical attacks. We use machine learning (ML) to design an attack resilient Feed-Forward Controller (FFC), which runs in tandem with the RV’s primary controller and monitors it. Under attacks, the FFC takes over from the RV’s primary controller to recover the RV, and allows the RV to complete its mission successfully. Our evaluation on 6 RV systems including 3 real RVs shows that our proposed framework prevents crashes and allows RVs to complete their missions successfully despite attacks in 86% of the cases. Further, we propose designs to streamline the implementation of the FFC-based recovery and its application in new RV systems.