A Secure dToF LiDAR SoC with Dual-Domain Fingerprinting and Event-Driven AFE Circuit Achieving Sensor-Level Attack Resilience

By Risa Nonaka, Ryoya Matsuno, Shota Nagai, Satomi Miyagi, Yuki Hayakawa, Ryo Suzuki, Kazuma Ikeda, Ozora Sako, Rokuto Nagata, Ryo Yoshida, Shimpei Ando, Wenlun Zhang, Kentaro Yoshioka
Keio University, Japan

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that most commercial direct time-of-flight (dToF) LiDARs can be spoofed by injecting high-frequency laser pulses into the receiver, which can erase pedestrians from the point cloud. This paper presents the first dToF LiDAR system-on-chip (SoC) with integrated sensor-level hardware security against spoofing attacks. We propose Dual-Domain Fingerprinting (DDF), which emits laser pulse pairs whose time interval and amplitude ratio are both randomized and authenticates received echoes in this two-dimensional space, so that spoofed signals are rejected before they corrupt the ranging result. An Event-Driven AFE (ED-AFE) activates the ADC only around pulse peaks: it digitizes three samples around each peak with a triggered ADC at 1-GHz sampling and applies parabolic interpolation, achieving 1-cm distance resolution with a 99% reduction in ADC power. A time-modulated laser driver controls the laser amplitude from 10% to 100% by modulating the charge time of a laser capacitor, providing the microsecond-order amplitude modulation required by DDF. A LiDAR system with a 16-channel 65-nm CMOS prototype SoC demonstrates up to 120-m ranging and an AFE power of 3.1 mW per channel, 60% lower than prior art. In a proof-of-concept experiment in which the dual-domain authentication is applied to measured sensor data, 73% of the point cloud is protected under spoofing attack, compared with 0% without DDF.

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