CP-FREEZER: Latency Attacks against Vehicular Cooperative Perception
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Abstract (arXiv)
Cooperative perception (CP) enhances situational awareness of connected and autonomous vehicles by exchanging and combining messages from multiple agents. While prior work has explored adversarial integrity attacks that degrade perceptual accuracy, little is known about CP's robustness against attacks on timeliness (or availability), a safety-critical requirement for autonomous driving. In this paper, we present CP-FREEZER, the first latency attack that maximizes the computation delay of CP algorithms by injecting adversarial perturbation via V2V messages. Our attack resolves several unique challenges, including the non-differentiability of point cloud preprocessing, asynchronous knowledge of the victim's input due to transmission delays, and uses a novel loss function that effectively maximizes the execution time of the CP pipeline. Extensive experiments show that CP-FREEZER increases end-to-end CP latency by over 90×, pushing per-frame processing time beyond 3 seconds with a 100% success rate on our real-world vehicle testbed. Our findings reveal a critical threat to the availability of CP systems, highlighting the urgent need for robust defenses.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 16 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2025.
Builds on
16 of 29 references.
References · 16
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
- 2017Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attackscited by 6,415
- 2017CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulatorcited by 2,449
- 2016Adversarial examples in the physical worldcited by 1,769
- 2018PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Cloudscited by 1,715
- 2022Where2comm: Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Spatial Confidence Mapscited by 255
- 2019F-Cooper: Feature based Cooperative Perception for Autonomous Vehicle Edge Computing System Using 3D Point Cloudscited by 171
- 2022Robust Collaborative 3D Object Detection in Presence of Pose Errorscited by 129
- 2020Sponge Examples: Energy-Latency Attacks on Neural Networkscited by 111
- 2022COOPERNAUT: End-to-End Driving with Cooperative Perception for Networked Vehiclescited by 95
- 2024An Extensible Framework for Open Heterogeneous Collaborative Perceptioncited by 87
- 2024Inducing High Energy-Latency of Large Vision-Language Models with Verbose Imagescited by 69
4 more
- 2021Adversarial Attacks On Multi-Agent Communicationcited by 49
- 2022Learning for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative Perception under Lossy Communicationcited by 47
- 2023Among Us: Adversarially Robust Collaborative Perception by Consensuscited by 37
- 2022Phantom Sponges: Exploiting Non-Maximum Suppression to Attack Deep Object Detectorscited by 28
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.