NDSS 2025 – L-HAWK: A Controllable Physical Adversarial Patch Against A Long-Distance Target

Session 14D: Autonomous Vehicles

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Taifeng Liu (Xidian University), Yang Liu (Xidian University), Zhuo Ma (Xidian University), Tong Yang (Peking University), Xinjing Liu (Xidian University), Teng Li (Xidian University), Jianfeng Ma (Xidian University)
PAPERL-HAWK: A Controllable Physical Adversarial Patch Against a Long-Distance Target
The vision-based perception modules in autonomous vehicles (AVs) are prone to physical adversarial patch attacks. However, most existing attacks indiscriminately affect all passing vehicles. This paper introduces L-HAWK, a novel controllable physical adversarial patch activated by long-distance laser signals. L-HAWK is designed to target specific vehicles when the adversarial patch is triggered by laser signals while remaining benign under normal conditions. To achieve this goal and address the unique challenges associated with laser signals, we propose an asynchronous learning method for L-HAWK to determine the optimal laser parameters and the corresponding adversarial patch. To enhance the attack robustness in real-world scenarios, we introduce a multi-angle and multi-position simulation mechanism, a noise approximation approach, and a progressive sampling-based method. L-HAWK has been validated through extensive experiments in both digital and physical environments. Compared to a 59% success rate of TPatch (USENIX ’23) at 7 meters, L-HAWK achieves a 91.9% average attack success rate at 50 meters. This represents a 56% improvement in attack success rate and a more than sevenfold increase in attack distance.
ABOUT NDSSThe Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations’ YouTube Channel.

Permalink

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Infosecurity.US authored by Marc Handelman. Read the original post at: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/FCPmCtxA_fo?si=78D9RdO9ZJYiuQxI

About Author

AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

See author's posts