A new arXiv survey examines thermal side-channel and perception attacks against autonomous vehicles. The authors note that AVs pair safety-critical perception with compute that is thermally constrained, creating conditions where heat and temperature become relevant to security.
The survey's central observation is that interfaces built for night perception and for package thermal reliability were never engineered as confidentiality boundaries. That means these systems may leak information or be manipulated in ways that standard security models do not anticipate.
The abstract only hints at the full scope, but it suggests that closing these gaps remains an open challenge. The paper appears to map these attack surfaces, though the details of any proposed mitigations are not included in the abstract.