Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is a widely used driver assistance technology for maintaining the desired speed and safe distance to the leading vehicle. This paper evaluates the security of the deep neural network (DNN) based ACC systems under runtime stealthy perception attacks that strategically inject perturbations into camera data to cause forward collisions. We present a context-aware strategy for the selection of the most critical times for triggering the attacks and a novel optimization-based method for the adaptive generation of image perturbations at runtime. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed attack using a publicly available driving dataset, an actual vehicle, and a realistic simulation platform with the control software from a production ACC system, a physical-world driving simulator, and interventions by the human driver and safety features such as Advanced Emergency Braking System (AEBS). Experimental results show that the proposed attack achieves 142.9 times higher success rate in causing hazards and 89.6% higher evasion rate than baselines while being stealthy and robust to real-world factors and dynamic changes in the environment. This study highlights the role of human drivers and basic safety mechanisms in preventing attacks.

Trust me, I have no intention of trusting autonomous vehicle braking. One of the terms we see pop up in almost every technical vector is autonomous vehicles. As with 5G, the autonomous vehicle landscape is fraught with hype. That has even spilled over to the consumer marketing arena with tons of ads for automobiles showing hands-off braking, lane navigation, self-parking, and more. Depending upon with whom one speaks, autonomous vehicles are anywhere from level 3 to level 5. Of course, the only one who believes we are at level 5 is Elon Musk, with his claims for Teslas.

The tech is pretty cool, but don't let new developments in self-driving cars distract you from your responsibilities behind the wheel. Ford's Co-Pilot360 system offers an array of driver-assist features that including automatic emergency braking. One of the most common semi-autonomous driving features added to cars these days is automatic emergency braking. This feature stepped into the spotlight in two recent crashes for different reasons, one involving an Uber self-driving car in Arizona in March and another involving a Tesla Model S in Utah a few weeks ago. What can it do -- and what shouldn't a driver expect it to handle?