arXiv subjects

Alfred Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Alfred Chen.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Survey of Security Challenges and Solutions for Advanced Air Mobility and eVTOL Aircraft

This survey reviews the existing and envisioned security vulnerabilities and defense mechanisms relevant to Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) systems, with a focus on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Drawing from vulnerabilities in the avionics in commercial aviation and the automated unmanned aerial systems (UAS), the paper presents a taxonomy of attacks, analyzes mitigation strategies, and proposes a secure system architecture tailored to the future AAM ecosystem. The paper also highlights key threat vectors, including Global Positioning System (GPS) jamming/spoofing, ATC radio frequency misuse, attacks on TCAS and ADS-B, possible backdoor via Electronic Flight Bag (EFB), new vulnerabilities introduced by aircraft automation and connectivity, and risks from flight management system (FMS) software, database and cloud services. Finally, this paper describes emerging defense techniques against these attacks, and open technical problems to address toward better defense mechanisms.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

PaniCar: Securing the Perception of Advanced Driving Assistance Systems Against Emergency Vehicle Lighting

The safety of autonomous cars has come under scrutiny in recent years, especially after 16 documented incidents involving Teslas (with autopilot engaged) crashing into parked emergency vehicles (police cars, ambulances, and firetrucks). While previous studies have revealed that strong light sources often introduce flare artifacts in the captured image, which degrade the image quality, the impact of flare on object detection performance remains unclear. In this research, we unveil PaniCar, a digital phenomenon that causes an object detector's confidence score to fluctuate below detection thresholds when exposed to activated emergency vehicle lighting. This vulnerability poses a significant safety risk, and can cause autonomous vehicles to fail to detect objects near emergency vehicles. In addition, this vulnerability could be exploited by adversaries to compromise the security of advanced driving assistance systems (ADASs). We assess seven commercial ADASs (Tesla Model 3, "manufacturer C", HP, Pelsee, AZDOME, Imagebon, Rexing), four object detectors (YOLO, SSD, RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN), and 14 patterns of emergency vehicle lighting to understand the influence of various technical and environmental factors. We also evaluate four SOTA flare removal methods and show that their performance and latency are insufficient for real-time driving constraints. To mitigate this risk, we propose Caracetamol, a robust framework designed to enhance the resilience of object detectors against the effects of activated emergency vehicle lighting. Our evaluation shows that on YOLOv3 and Faster RCNN, Caracetamol improves the models' average confidence of car detection by 0.20, the lower confidence bound by 0.33, and reduces the fluctuation range by 0.33. In addition, Caracetamol is capable of processing frames at a rate of between 30-50 FPS, enabling real-time ADAS car detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

On the Closed Form Expression of Elementary Symmetric Polynomials and the Inverse of Vandermonde Matrix

Inverse Vandermonde matrix calculation is a long-standing problem to solve nonsingular linear system $Vc=b$ where the rows of a square matrix $V$ are constructed by progression of the power polynomials. It has many applications in scientific computing including interpolation, super-resolution, and construction of special matrices applied in cryptography. Despite its numerous applications, the matrix is highly ill-conditioned where specialized treatments are considered for approximation such as conversion to Cauchy matrix, spectral decomposition, and algorithmic tailoring of the numerical solutions. In this paper, we propose a generalized algorithm that takes arbitrary pairwise (non-repetitive) sample nodes for solving inverse Vandermonde matrix. This is done in two steps: first, a highly balanced recursive algorithm is introduced with $\mathcal{O}(N)$ complexity to solve the combinatorics summation of the elementary symmetric polynomials; and second, a closed-form solution is tailored for inverse Vandermonde where the matrix' elements utilize this recursive summation for the inverse calculations. The numerical stability and accuracy of the proposed inverse method is analyzed through the spectral decomposition of the Frobenius companion matrix that associates with the corresponding Vandermonde matrix. The results show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art solutions using specific nodes such as $N$th roots of unity defined on the complex plane. A basic application in one dimensional interpolation problem is considered to demonstrate the utility of the proposed method for super-resolved signals.

math.NA↗