Temporal Logic-Based Multi-Vehicle Backdoor Attacks against Offline RL Agents in End-to-end Autonomous Driving

Assessing the safety of autonomous driving (AD) systems against security threats, particularly backdoor attacks, is a stepping stone for real-world deployment. However, existing works mainly focus on pixel-level triggers which are impractical to deploy in the real world. We address this gap by introducing a novel backdoor attack against the end-to-end AD systems that leverage one or more other vehicles' trajectories as triggers. To generate precise trigger trajectories, we first use temporal logic (TL) specifications to define the behaviors of attacker vehicles. Configurable behavior models are then used to generate these trajectories, which are quantitatively evaluated and iteratively refined based on the TL specifications. We further develop a negative training strategy by incorporating patch trajectories that are similar to triggers but are designated not to activate the backdoor. It enhances the stealthiness of the attack and refines the system’s responses to trigger scenarios. Through extensive experiments on 5 offline reinforcement learning (RL) driving agents with 6 trigger patterns and target actions combinations, we demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our proposed attack, showing the under-exploration of existing end-to-end AD systems' vulnerabilities to such trajectory-based backdoor attacks. Videos of our attack are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/tlbackdoor/home.