Brief industry paper: HDAD: hyperdimensional computing-based anomaly detection for automotive sensor attacks

As the connectivity of autonomous vehicles keeps growing, it is an accepted fact that they are even more vulnerable to malicious cyber-attacks. Recently, sensor spoofing has become an emerging attack that can compromise vehicle safety as vehicles are equipped with more sensors. Thus, it is critical to validate the sensor readings before utilizing them for future actions. In this paper, we develop HDAD, a hyperdimensional computing-based anomaly detection method. Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an emerging brain-inspired computing paradigm that mimics the brain cognition and leverages hyperdimensional vectors with fully distributed holographic representation and (pseudo)randomness. The key idea of HDAD is to use HDC to build encoder and decoder to reconstruct the sensor readings. The anomalous data typically have comparatively higher reconstruction errors than normal sensor readings. We explore three different metrics to measure the reconstruction error including mean squared error, mean absolute error, and cosine similarity. Using a real-world vehicle sensor reading dataset, we demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of HDAD, opening the door for a new set of anomaly detection algorithm design.