Experimental Evaluation of Security Attacks on Self-Driving Car Platforms

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 14 Mar 2026] Experimental Evaluation of Security Attacks on Self-Driving Car Platforms Viet K. Nguyen, Nathan Lee, Mohammad Husain Deep learning-based perception pipelines in autonomous ground vehicles are vulnerable to both adversarial manipulation and network-layer disruption. We present a systematic, on-hardware experimental evaluation of five attack classes: FGSM, PGD, man-in-the-middle (MitM), denial-of-service (DoS), and phantom attacks on low-cost autonomous vehicle platforms (JetRacer and Yahboom). Using a standardized 13-second experimental protocol and comprehensive automated logging, we systematically characterize three dimensions of attack behavior:(i) control deviation, (ii) computational cost, and (iii) runtime responsiveness. Our analysis reveals that distinct attack classes produce consistent and separable "fingerprints" across these dimensions: perception attacks (MitM output manipulation and phantom projection) generate high steering deviation signatures with nominal computational overhead, PGD produces combined steering perturbation and computational load signatures across multiple dimensions, and DoS exhibits frame rate and latency degradation signatures with minimal control-plane perturbation. We demonstrate that our fingerprinting framework generalizes across both digital attacks (adversarial perturbations, network manipulation) and environmental attacks (projected false features), providing a foundation for attack-aware monitoring systems and targeted, signature-based defense mechanisms. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) Cite as: arXiv:2603.14124 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.14124v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.14124 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Mohammad I. Husain [view email] [v1] Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:23:10 UTC (11,251 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs eess eess.IV References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)