Chronos: Timing Interference as a New Attack Vector on Autonomous Cyber-physical Systems

Timing property plays a vital role in the Cyber-Physical System(CPS) due to its interaction with the physical world. The smooth operation of these robotic systems often relies on an accurate and timely perception and actuation of the physical world. In this poster, we demonstrated a unique new class of attack, Chronos, that exploits timing interference to cause system destabilization in cyber-physical systems. Using a compromised non-privileged non-critical task on the system, we launch timing interference attacks on both drone and autonomous vehicle platforms. Through both open-loop and close-loop testing on the end-to-end stack, we showed that the timing attack could lead to complete loss of control of the autonomous system, crashing them onto the surroundings when there is no software vulnerability. To further understand this novel attack vector, we perform preliminary investigations on the localization component of these two platforms, because they both make use of well-known simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms that depend on timing-sensitive multimodal data from different sensors. Building on the insights from the case study, we present our formulation of the timing attack surface and highlight future directions.