Cross-Modal Phantom: Coordinated Camera-LiDAR Spoofing Bypasses Autonomous Vehicle Multi-Sensor Fusion

arXiv·medium signal

Researchers demonstrate that multi-sensor fusion in autonomous vehicles — designed to prevent single-sensor spoofing — can be bypassed by fabricating cross-sensor consistency, making camera and LiDAR agree on the same false object. The Cross-Modal Phantom attack exploits the assumption that fusion provides redundancy, when in reality the fusion process itself introduces a subtle vulnerability to coordinated spoofing across modalities.