TrackShield: An Efficient Runtime Defense Against Availability Attacks on High-Performance Real-Time Multi-Object Tracking

High-performance camera-based perception pipelines must sustain per-frame real-time budgets on resource-constrained embedded GPU platforms. Availability attacks such as SlowTrack inflate the persistent state of multi-object trackers: data-association workload accumulates across frames, so per-frame latency increases and drives the pipeline past its deadline. Detector- and NMS-layer defenses do not directly control this persistent tracker-side resource. We present TrackShield, a lightweight runtime resource-management layer that protects the tracker at the point where attack-induced workload accumulates. TrackShield combines low-overhead anomaly monitoring with staged birth capping, pruning of young or weakly matched tracks, and per-stage association-input admission control. Its hard admission guard provides a deterministic bound on admitted association workload, independently of the heuristic monitor. On a Jetson AGX Orin, TrackShield reduces attacked tracking-stage latency from 139.90 to 6.27,ms and whole-pipeline P99 latency from 190.9 to 48.8,ms, at a benign MOTA cost of 1.06 points. As an availability defense, TrackShield focuses on keeping the tracker responsive under attack instead of recovering the full tracking accuracy degraded by adversarial detections.