  Due to their robustness to degraded capturing conditions, radars are widely
used for environment perception, which is a critical task in applications like
autonomous vehicles. More specifically, Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) radars are
particularly efficient for short range settings as they carry rich information
on the environment. Recent UWB-based systems rely on Machine Learning (ML) to
exploit the rich signature of these sensors. However, ML classifiers are
susceptible to adversarial examples, which are created from raw data to fool
the classifier such that it assigns the input to the wrong class. These attacks
represent a serious threat to systems integrity, especially for safety-critical
applications. In this work, we present a new adversarial attack on UWB radars
in which an adversary injects adversarial radio noise in the wireless channel
to cause an obstacle recognition failure. First, based on signals collected in
real-life environment, we show that conventional attacks fail to generate
robust noise under realistic conditions. We propose a-RNA, i.e., Adversarial
Radio Noise Attack to overcome these issues. Specifically, a-RNA generates an
adversarial noise that is efficient without synchronization between the input
signal and the noise. Moreover, a-RNA generated noise is, by-design, robust
against pre-processing countermeasures such as filtering-based defenses.
Moreover, in addition to the undetectability objective by limiting the noise
magnitude budget, a-RNA is also efficient in the presence of sophisticated
defenses in the spectral domain by introducing a frequency budget. We believe
this work should alert about potentially critical implementations of
adversarial attacks on radar systems that should be taken seriously.
