AME Seminar: Ming Li
Thursday, November 3rd, 2022 - 4:00 p.m.
Ming Li
Assistant Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Arizona
"Security of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles: From Perception to Decision-Making"
AME Lecture Hall, Room S202 | Zoom link
Abstract: Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) vehicles adopt various types of sensors to perceive their surrounding environment, and exchange information via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications to augment such perception. This is further leveraged for automated decision-making, with the benefits of enhanced travel safety and efficiency. The security of CAV applications has received significant attention in recent years, as malicious actors can exploit the vulnerabilities in the perception pipeline, as well as communication protocols and/or vehicle control algorithms to cause unsafe consequences. In the first part of this talk, Dr. Li will introduce the vulnerabilities of sensor perception modules of autonomous vehicles, and show how an external adversary can remotely spoof both the sensing mechanism and machine-learning-based object detection/classification algorithms (using the camera as an example). Then he will present a novel defense framework to counter such attacks, which is input modality-agnostic. In the second part, Dr. Li will focus on vehicle platooning applications and demonstrate the impact of false data injection and communication-based jamming or delay attacks against cooperative adaptive cruise control algorithms. After that, he will present hisr work on enhancing the security and robustness of decision-making for CAVs under the presence of false/untrustworthy messages in a vehicular network. Finally, Dr. Li will discuss future directions in this area.
Bio: Ming Li is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona, and is also affiliated with the Computer Science Department. He was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Utah State University from 2011 to 2015. He received his Ph.D. in ECE from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA, in 2011. His main research interests are wireless and cyber security, with current emphases on cross-layer optimization and machine learning in wireless networks, wireless physical layer security, privacy enhancing technologies, and cyber-physical system security. He received the NSF Early Faculty Development (CAREER) Award in 2014, and the ONR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award in 2016. Dr. Li has published extensively in top-tier security and networking conferences, including ACM CCS, USENIX Security, NDSS, IEEE S&P, IEEE INFOCOM, ACM Mobihoc, etc. He has received six best paper/poster awards from various conferences/workshops, including a best paper award from ACM WiSec 2020. Currently, he serves on the editorial boards of IEEE TMC and TDSC. He is a senior member of IEEE and is a member of ACM.