arXiv subjects

Sri Hrushikesh Varma Bhupathiraju

Publications and source records attributed to Sri Hrushikesh Varma Bhupathiraju.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Illusion of Depth: Revealing Hidden Stereo Vision Vulnerabilities in Depth Estimation

Stereo cameras are integrated into autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, drones, and robots to offer precise depth estimation in a cost-effective manner compared to LiDAR technology. In this work, we reveal an intrinsic vulnerability in stereo cameras that stems from their pixel sampling and calibration processes, which can influence the outputs of stereo matching algorithms. Attackers can achieve fine-grained control over the estimated depth of real obstacles using simple repeating patterns, without relying on sophisticated adversarial machine learning techniques. Furthermore, deep learning-based depth estimation models exhibit a similar vulnerability. We evaluate the impact of this attack on two widely used stereo matching algorithms (BM and SGBM), three deep learning models (PSMNet, MoCha-Stereo, and UniMatch), a stereo-LiDAR fusion model (SGM-DDC), and two popular commercial stereo cameras, the ZED2 and Intel RealSense D435. For example, in the ZED2 camera, an attacker can displace obstacles up to 20~meters farther or 12~meters closer. In our real-world evaluation in a driving setting, a brief 0.5~second attack can trigger emergency braking in a popular autonomous driving framework. We further demonstrate the feasibility at driving speeds up to 40~km/h using CARLA. Finally, we confirm the ineffectiveness of state-of-the-art defenses, and we propose a novel strategy that leverages similarity scores to dynamically detect and suppress the depth discrepancies. Our work highlights vulnerabilities hidden in stereo matching and deep learning depth estimation models, addressing critical limitations in autonomous system deployments.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

AquaSonic: Acoustic Manipulation of Underwater Data Center Operations and Resource Management

Underwater datacenters (UDCs) hold promise as next-generation data storage due to their energy efficiency and environmental sustainability benefits. While the natural cooling properties of water save power, the isolated aquatic environment and long-range sound propagation in water create unique vulnerabilities which differ from those of on-land data centers. Our research discovers the unique vulnerabilities of fault-tolerant storage devices, resource allocation software, and distributed file systems to acoustic injection attacks in UDCs. With a realistic testbed approximating UDC server operations, we empirically characterize the capabilities of acoustic injection underwater and find that an attacker can reduce fault-tolerant RAID 5 storage system throughput by 17% up to 100%. Our closed-water analyses reveal that attackers can (i) cause unresponsiveness and automatic node removal in a distributed filesystem with only 2.4 minutes of sustained acoustic injection, (ii) induce a distributed database's latency to increase by up to 92.7% to reduce system reliability, and (iii) induce load-balance managers to redirect up to 74% of resources to a target server to cause overload or force resource colocation. Furthermore, we perform open-water experiments in a lake and find that an attacker can cause controlled throughput degradation at a maximum allowable distance of 6.35 m using a commercial speaker. We also investigate and discuss the effectiveness of standard defenses against acoustic injection attacks. Finally, we formulate a novel machine learning-based detection system that reaches 0% False Positive Rate and 98.2% True Positive Rate trained on our dataset of profiled hard disk drives under 30-second FIO benchmark execution. With this work, we aim to help manufacturers proactively protect UDCs against acoustic injection attacks and ensure the security of subsea computing infrastructures.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Invisible Reflections: Leveraging Infrared Laser Reflections to Target Traffic Sign Perception

All vehicles must follow the rules that govern traffic behavior, regardless of whether the vehicles are human-driven or Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Road signs indicate locally active rules, such as speed limits and requirements to yield or stop. Recent research has demonstrated attacks, such as adding stickers or projected colored patches to signs, that cause CAV misinterpretation, resulting in potential safety issues. Humans can see and potentially defend against these attacks. But humans can not detect what they can not observe. We have developed an effective physical-world attack that leverages the sensitivity of filterless image sensors and the properties of Infrared Laser Reflections (ILRs), which are invisible to humans. The attack is designed to affect CAV cameras and perception, undermining traffic sign recognition by inducing misclassification. In this work, we formulate the threat model and requirements for an ILR-based traffic sign perception attack to succeed. We evaluate the effectiveness of the ILR attack with real-world experiments against two major traffic sign recognition architectures on four IR-sensitive cameras. Our black-box optimization methodology allows the attack to achieve up to a 100% attack success rate in indoor, static scenarios and a >80.5% attack success rate in our outdoor, moving vehicle scenarios. We find the latest state-of-the-art certifiable defense is ineffective against ILR attacks as it mis-certifies >33.5% of cases. To address this, we propose a detection strategy based on the physical properties of IR laser reflections which can detect 96% of ILR attacks.

cs.CR↗