Camera Authentication
- Camera authentication features and supported cameras.
- How security features are deployed and configured with NVIDIA Drive OS 6 and how applications can use these features.
- How authentication features can be enabled for additional camera sensors.
The target audience of this topic consists of OEMs and system integrators, software developers writing applications for Drive OS 6, and camera device driver writers.
Motivation and Use Cases
Cameras are used in autonomous vehicles for perception of the environment surrounding the vehicle. Camera data is typically used to assist the driver in maneuvering the vehicle, or to control the vehicle direction and speed, depending on the level of autonomy.
Several security threats are possible and applicable to this architecture. At a high level they are:
- Tampering of the camera or its sensor: An entity that gains physical access to the camera and its sensor can tamper with the image or other data sent by the camera.
- Tampering of image data: An entity that gains physical access to hardware CSI image data read channels can tamper with image data. Image data can be tampered in a way to disrupt the perception application that consumes this data. This can result in misclassification of image data.
- Tampering of I2C Settings: An entity that gains physical access to HW I2C write channels can tamper with settings written by sensor drivers. These settings control the camera and can cause the quality of images sent by the camera to be affected to the point where images may not be correctly processed by perception applications.
- Image Frame Replay and Forgery: An entity that gains physical access to hardware CSI image data read channels can intercept and replay previously sent image frames or forge new image frames. Image data can be tampered with to disrupt the perception application that consumes this data. This can result in misclassification of image data.
The camera authentication features provide mitigations against these threats.
Camera Authentication Features
NVIDIA DRIVE OS provides the following camera authentication features to mitigate against threats.
- Camera authentication: establish the authenticity of the camera module and its sensor.
- Image authentication: ensure that the image data is coming from the expected sensor, has not been tampered with, and is not a replay of a previously sent camera frame.
- Control authentication: ensure that control messages (typically exchanged with i2c) are not tampered with.
Supported Products
There is no established standard for authenticating camera modules or authenticating data from camera modules. The camera authentication algorithms and protocols used depend on the capabilities provided by a specific camera model, with each camera vendor implementing their own proprietary solution.