Temporal HDR camera fusion vulnerable to pulsed light attacks
Lights, Camera, Attack: Exploiting Temporal HDR Fusion with Pulsed Light
Cryptography and Security
Summary
Many modern cameras create clearer images by combining several photos taken with different brightness settings. This approach assumes the lighting doesn’t change much while the photos are taken. The authors show that flashing a bright light in a certain way can trick the camera’s processing, making it produce very dark or very bright images instead of normal ones. This can confuse things that rely on camera images, like security systems or self-driving cars. They also propose a way to reduce this problem by detecting and ignoring suspicious exposures.
What this means in practice
- •For automotive engineers: Improve self-driving car cameras by considering pulsed light interference to avoid false darkening of critical visual targets like traffic cones.
- •For security system integrators: Design surveillance cameras to recognize and mitigate pulsed light attacks that cause image darkening and loss of visibility in security footage.
Authors
Alkim Domeke, Michael Kuhr, Roman Gilliatt, Mohammad Hamad, Sebastian Steinhorst, Bing Li, Long Cheng, Mert D. Pesé
Abstract
Modern cameras widely use temporal High Dynamic Range (HDR) to improve visibility by capturing a sequence of exposures with different integration times and fusing them into a single image. This process implicitly assumes that scene illumination remains sufficiently stable during capture. We introduce FLASH (Fusion-Level Attack by Saturating HDR), an external pulsed-light attack that deliberately attacks this assumption by creating cross-exposure inconsistency before downstream perception. FLASH exploits an algorithmic assumption rather than relying on sensor damage or hardware failure, and requires neither physical camera access, access to raw exposure brackets, knowledge of the fusion algorithm, nor exact phase lock to the camera. Across eight physical camera platforms spanning embedded, surveillance, photography, smartphone, and automotive use cases, and matched optical controls, FLASH causes pipeline-dependent darkening, overexposure, and visibility loss. This includes extreme-darkening rates of 50.0% on an iPhone 16 Pro and 33.7% on a Wyze Battery Cam Pro. On the Wyze camera, FLASH triggers the system-level low-visibility response in 10/10 trials, compared with 0/10 continuous-light and randomized-frequency flashing controls. In a controlled stationary OpenPilot case study, 23.0% of frames exhibit severe darkening in the traffic-cone target region, with target-background CNR decreasing by up to 90.8%. Under FLASH, the OpenPilot interface also fails to display the system-level path state observed in the corresponding control trials. In a controlled night-only HDR reconstruction stress test, a proof-of-concept exposure-rejection defense reduces median output-brightness deviation by 79.16%. These results show that temporal HDR fusion itself requires security-aware validation of exposure evidence.