On GAN-based Data Integrity Attacks Against Robotic Spatial Sensing

Abstract

Communication is arguably the most important way to enable cooperation among multiple robots. In numerous such settings, robots exchange local sensor measurements to form a global perception of the environment. One example of this setting is adaptive multi-robot informative path planning, where robots’ local measurements are “fused” using probabilistic techniques (e.g., Gaussian process models) for more accurate prediction of the underlying ambient phenomena. In an adversarial setting, in which we assume a malicious entity–-the adversary-–can modify data exchanged during inter-robot communications, these cooperating robots become vulnerable to data integrity attacks. Such attacks on a multi-robot informative path planning system may, for example, replace the original sensor measurements with fake measurements to negatively affect achievable prediction accuracy. In this paper, we study how such an adversary may design data integrity attacks using a Generative Adversarial Network
(GAN). Results show the GAN-based techniques learning spatial patterns in training data to produce fake measurements that are relatively undetectable yet significantly degrade prediction accuracy.