AVGuard: A Forensic Investigation Framework for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on on-board sensors and computation capabilities to drive on the road with limited or no human intervention. However, autonomous driving decisions can go wrong for numerous reasons, leading to accidents on the road. The AVs lack a proper forensics investigation framework, which is essential for various reasons such as resolving insurance disputes, investigating attacks, compliance with autonomous driving safety guidelines, etc. To design robust and safe AVs, identifying the actual reason behind any incident involving the AV is crucial. Hence, it is essential to collect meaningful logs from different autonomous driving modules and store them in a secure and tamper-proof way. In this paper, we propose AVGuard, a forensic investigation framework that collects and stores the autonomous driving logs. The framework can generate and verify proofs to ensure the integrity of collected logs while preventing collusion attacks among multiple dishonest parties. The stored logs can be used later by investigators to identify the exact incident. Our proof-of-concept implementation shows that the framework can be integrated with autonomous driving modules efficiently without any significant overheads.