EAGER: SARE: Secure LiDAR Systems with Frequency Encryption

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Today’s smart devices, robots, and vehicles are becoming ever more autonomous and this places utmost importance on their reliability and safety. To meet these safety demands, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) systems have been used to make a 3D map of environment in order to navigate the autonomous agent and avoid collisions. A LiDAR measures the distance by illuminating a target with laser light and detects the reflection with a sensor. They are becoming an inevitable part of autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots by providing this vital sensing and imaging capability. However, today’s LiDARs also impose potential human and public safety threats due to their security vulnerabilities. For instance, an attacker can deliberately send a spoofing signal to the victim’s LiDAR which cannot differentiate the spoofing signal from the actual reflected signal. In doing so, attacker can overwrite the actual reflected signal. Eventually, the attacker can trick the victim by hiding or misrepresenting its actual location, leading to serious security and safety issues. While LiDAR systems are on the verge of commercialization, these scenarios are unavoidable and the prevention techniques have not been well studied and researched. This project aims at investigating these issues and proposing a new secure scheme based on frequency encryption. In addition to LiDAR, this approach will have significant broader impacts on securing various types of wireless optical systems and satellite communications as well. Furthermore, this research involving electro-optical system design offers many exciting opportunities to incorporate new materials and paradigms into the curriculums and STEM-related K-12 outreach programs. Investigating the hardware-level security issues of complex electro-optical systems such as a LiDAR requires new unified electronic-photonic modeling and co-simulation frameworks. This work develops such a platform by utilizing Verilog-A and MATLAB behavioral models and incorporating all relevant electro-optical dynamics. This platform enables simultaneously studying the performance and security vulnerabilities including jamming and spoofing of LiDAR systems. In particular, this project focuses on beam steering frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDARs since they are the most promising and robust LiDAR technology as of today. Additionally, the results will be experimentally verified using a benchtop lab setup. Finally, a novel ranging approach called frequency encrypted FMCW (FE-FMCW) will be developed and implemented which can protect the state-of-the-art FMCW LiDAR systems from malicious attacks with minimal compromise on performance. In order to do so, a holistic design methodology based on mixed-signal electronic and photonic circuit design and signal processing will be deployed to realize and implement the newly proposed FE-FMCW LiDAR. This technique relies on a new optical phase-locked loop (OPLL) design which can encrypt the frequency chirp-rate of the laser while maintaining required linearity and bandwidth for FMCW signals. The frequency encryption code is generated on the integrated-circuit chip and it will be unique to each LiDAR hardware system. This new technique will transform the system architecture of future LiDAR systems and many other emerging electronic-photonic systems as well as ensuring their security and safety.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.