CIAplates: Covert, Intelligent, Adversarial Attack on Automated License Plate Recognition Systems using Digital License Plates

Digital license plates are increasingly being introduced as an option for motorists and fleet operators alike. Naturally, turning such an important identification device into a digitally controlled, internet-connected device opens up the possibility for abuse of such devices. In this paper, we introduce CIAplates, an attack created by combining physical adversarial attack generation and fast electrophoretic display (EPD) technology to turn commercially available digital license plates into a covert adversarial attack delivery vector for automated license plate recognition (ALPR) systems, showing that such abuse is indeed possible. We investigate, implement, and evaluate multiple adversarial attack generation methods on physical hardware, both in test bed and real-world conditions, achieving successful attacks against OpenALPR, Plate Recognizer, and Qwen3-VL while using less than 6.2% of the total plate area for perturbations, highlighting the plausibility of real-world attacks. Furthermore, we show that countermeasures to a CIAplates attack can be practically implemented, paving the way to further research and implementation of defenses in future systems.