SLACK: Attacking LiDAR-based SLAM with Adversarial Point Injections

The widespread adoption of learning-based methods for the LiDAR makes autonomous vehicles vulnerable to adversarial attacks through adversarial $\mathit{\text{point}}\mathit{\text{injections}}\mathit{\text{(PiJ)}}$. It poses serious security challenges for navigation and map generation. Despite its critical nature, no major work exists that studies learning-based attacks on LiDAR-based SLAM. Our work proposes SLACK, an end-to-end deep generative adversarial model to attack LiDAR scans with several point injections without deteriorating LiDAR quality. To facilitate SLACK, we design a novel yet simple autoencoder that augments contrastive learning with segmentation-based attention for precise reconstructions. SLACK demonstrates superior performance on the task of $\mathit{\text{point}}\mathit{\text{injections}}\mathit{\text{(PiJ)}}$ compared to the best baselines on KITTI and CARLA-64 dataset while maintaining accurate scan quality. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate PiJ attacks using a fraction of LiDAR points. It severely degrades navigation and map quality without deteriorating the LiDAR scan quality.