Researcher Hacks Self-Driving Car Sensors

An anonymous reader writes: Jonathan Petit, security researcher at Security Innovation, has created an electronics kit that costs only $60, which can flood LiDAR sensors on self-driving cars with a laser beam that contains fake data, making them think they have objects in front of them. This forces the self-driving car to slow down and sometimes abruptly stop. Affected cars include all manufacturers that deploy LiDAR sensors. As of now, Google and Apple are affected. According to this article, so may be Toyota's upcoming car.

Comments

Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[prasadsurve]

Throwing a puppy in front of the car will also achieve the same result.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[JaredOfEuropa]

For better results: puppies with frikkin' lasers attached to their adorable little heads.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[Anonymous Coward]

But with this you can do it from a much greater distance away, without getting caught!

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[michelcolman]

Yes, but you will be seen doing it. With this hack, you just need to be somewhere within eyesight, for example on the second floor of some building the car's driving by. You can stop any car you see if you can just target its lidar from a distance. You don't have to be in front of it to make it think there's something there.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[coofercat]

...or throw an empty supemarket plastic bag into the wind. Humans will identify and pretty much ignore it, but the automated systems will see a large object 'flying' in the path of the vehicle and will slow/stop/avoid.

All this tech is really cool - I mean really cool, but it's still got a long way to go before it's absolutely better than a human in all cases.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's terrible.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[maeka]

You don't have to be in front of it to make it think there's something there.

Uh, yes you do.

This device fools the sensor's range measurement, not the sensor's angle measurement.

So go right ahead a fake an obstacle above the car...

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[michelcolman]

I thought it just treated whatever echo it got as originating from its last sent pulse, determining the angle that way. An echo reveived shortly after sending a pulse forward, would indicate an object dead ahead. But apparently the sensor is revolving as well? Or is it a kind of camera that registers the location of the echos as well?

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[AmiMoJo]

I'd expect that by the time self-driving cars are available to buy/rent, they will have developed to the point that even when lidar is temporarily unavailable they can continue with other sensors. Tesla already do 90% of what is needed to drive a car without lidar, it's just that last 10% that is tricky. When cruising along the lidar isn't so important, the car wouldn't need to stop quickly just because one of its many sensors was blinded for a few seconds.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerds find the laser more adorable than the puppy.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[davester666]

Many of them keep sharks as pets for just this reason. And to be ready for then the gov't comes to take their computers away.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[maeka]

lidar sensors typically spin on both axis.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[firewrought]

Yes, but this could let you throw puppies in front of hundreds of cars all at once. Interstate cloverleafs would be particularly vulnerable under the right weather and traffic conditions. Two bored teens could rack up dozens of deaths and millions of damages, and while that's probably "only" 10x the damage they could do with a brick and an overpass, the psychological impact on the population would be tremendous.

I'd much rather manufacturers build thorough defenses before any lives are lost than for legislators to pass knee-jerk draconian legislation (criminalizing lasers or home electronics, for instance) after the fact.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have to be absolutely better than a human in all cases. It just has to be better than a human in the average case and economics will handle the rest. Unless people follow emotion instead of reality and continue to let 10s of thousands die every year in car incidents.

Re:Throwing a puppy in front of the car

[minstrelmike]

... When cruising along the lidar isn't so important, the car wouldn't need to stop quickly just because one of its many sensors was blinded for a few seconds.

You're thinking like a software person. This is hardware. If your Lidar is only 90% sure of what's in front of you, should you stop or keep going and possibly crash into something or kill a pedestrian? I know what the company lawyers would say.

Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nearly all of them (from sonar, radar, lidar...) all are susceptible to various interference techniques.

The only ones that exist that I'm sure are NOT directly affected are used by whales, dolphins, bats... They can be overpowered causing problems... but at the operational strength none seem affected even though they are using the same frequencies.

Even normal drivers are affected by having lights shined into their eyes... (which happens to be why it is illegal to aim laser pointers at aircraft or cars).

Re:Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[arglebargle_xiv]

Nearly all of them (from sonar, radar, lidar...) all are susceptible to various interference techniques.

For LIDAR it's actually not that hard to counter, instead of emitting a continuous series of pulses you emit a pseudrandom sequence. Anything that comes back that's out-of-sequence gets rejected. Since the attacker can't predict the sequence, they can't send back fake signals in the same order (assuming you're not using a crappy random number generator).

Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[mangobrain]

But doesn't LiDAR detect depth variance by the variance in response time to pulses? That is, you can't reject unexpected responses because you don't know when to expect them in the first place. If you knew, you would already know your surroundings, and wouldn't be measuring them!

Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[arglebargle_xiv]

Remember that you're dealing with something moving at the speed of light here, combined with short distances, so the delays are so minute that you need exotic techniques like optical heterodyne detection at the receiver to measure nanosecond-level differences. In fact I'm surprised the replay attack worked at all, I'm guessing the receivers were incredibly permissive in how they treat incoming signals, given that you'd (theoretically) need nanosecond-level synchronisation for it to work.

Re:Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless someone gets your shield harmonic codes, then you're screwed ;-)

Re:Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rotate the shield frequencies! Pattern Riker Seven Alpha!

Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[Capt.Albatross]

> I'm guessing the receivers were incredibly permissive in how they treat incoming signals.

I would not be at all surprised, as this technology is, or was until recently, in development.

First making it work and then hardening it is not a bad strategy, as long as you actually do the latter - and it is a good idea to think about how you would do it before you need to.

Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[asvravi]

It is correct that a pseudo random sequence (either LiDAR or Radar or SONAR) can offset this to some extent. I imagine the receiver already has some kind of heterodyning (synchronous mixing or counting) to detect the ranging delays in a continuous stream of uniform pulses. I also imagine the hack used here uses a synchronous emission - ie; detects the incoming pulse and emits a suitably phased identical pulse in the next cycles that would seem to be coming from a nearby obstacle with a lesser delay. A pseudo random sequence can counter such a synchronous emission since the attacker has no way of knowing the delay of the next pulse in respect to the currently received one. The synchronous emission essentially should show up as background noise.

Re:Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[dotancohen]

For LIDAR it's actually not that hard to counter, instead of emitting a continuous series of pulses you emit a pseudrandom sequence. Anything that comes back that's out-of-sequence gets rejected. Since the attacker can't predict the sequence, they can't send back fake signals in the same order (assuming you're not using a crappy random number generator).

I'm pretty sure that's how the Enterprise D was destroyed. Just make sure that the LIDAR frequency isn't displayed prominently on the dashboard.

Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem is, a pseudorandom code would have to be in modifying the phase of the light, and not by emitting pulses, as by definition, emitting pulses would negatively affect the accuracy of the system (remember, we're talking LADAR which uses very specific and targeted beams and not large spreading waves like RADAR). Pulsing it on and off would also be difficult because what if you came across such a devious device such as a grate which caused some portion of the pulses to be lost but some other portion to not. And as for modifying phase of lasers, I'm not sure how difficult that is, or if it's even possible. Besides, even if you code it, you throw in something to mess with it, it can't simply ignore it unless it has some way to extract the original signal as if you can't do that, the only safe thing to do is to stop as you're effectively blind. And isn't that the original goal, to stop the vehicle. Ultimately, you could simply achieve that by grabbing a powerful laser of the right color right at the vehicle. And today this is becoming a large problem with aircraft because of douches, as it effectively blinds pilots who have way better sensors (eyes) than these cars.

Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[HiThereImBob]

> I'm guessing the receivers were incredibly permissive in how they treat incoming signals.

I would not be at all surprised, as this technology is, or was until recently, in development.

First making it work and then hardening it is not a bad strategy, as long as you actually do the latter - and it is a good idea to think about how you would do it before you need to.

Does this really require hardening? For far less than $60 I could make a laser that permanently blinds human drivers. Should we require laser resistant windshields in all cars or maybe just arrest anyone stupid enough to aim a laser at traffic?

Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[StikyPad]

Laser-resistant windshields!!!

Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[Agripa]

Techniques for nanosecond (and better) level synchronization are obscure but not difficult; they involve various methods of interpolation which avoids the need for fast digital clocks.

Latency is a problem however. Instead of using high speed circuits it is easier to measure the time between triggers and uses this to generate the false response based on the previous trigger; the false response can then be accurately sent even before the pulse is received. This suggests an easy countermeasure; randomize or at least vary the time between pulses.

Re: Thats the usual problem with any radar system.

[Agripa]

If I were doing it, I would look at the distribution and randomize the time between pulses. Integration then averages out the spoofed responses while strengthening the real ones.

Informative

[monkeyxpress]

Great. I now know that a company called ‘security innovations’ is basically a front for a bunch of marketing and PR muppets who will sell you some snake oil attached to whatever is the latest media feeding frenzy using fear and misinformation.

I could go down to my local motorway junction with a pocket full of laser pointers right now and cause a whole lot of human-driven cars to have to slow down and enter a safety mode. I'm pretty sure I would get arrested for doing this, and I doubt the outcome for someone doing this to driverless cars will be any different. No doubt it will be drones with lasers next week.

Re:Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

drones with lasers next week

Arduino powered 3D printed drones with lasers that were purchased with bitcoin

Re:Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right about "drones with lasers" but at that point it gets a little trickier. They're not as common, but there are personal quadcopters that are programmable and fully automated. Add in some rudimentary image detection, and at that point you have a nearly untraceable weapon that can be used to wreak havoc while you're a hundred miles away. Hell, you could be on the other side of the planet if you just have it wake up and follow its script a few days later. And why only have one? You could have a bunch of them working together in an area.

I'm almost certain that within 50 years, all drones and 3D printers will be subject to the same level of scrutiny as firearms if not moreso. Kind of how right now all regular printers include anti-counterfitting mechanisms, every 3D printer will be required to leave its signature and every drone will require a serial number and "unapproved" 3D printers will probably be illegal. We're right on the verge of practically untraceable terrorism with no risk to the perpetrators, with only minimal cost and ever-decreasing barrier to entry in terms of skill required.

Re:Informative

[Dog-Cow]

Drones with shark bodies, of course.

Re:Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

3D printed from privately mined asteroids! In spaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!!!!

Re:Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that drones are trivial to make - and thus have no "hard to manufacture" parts that can be uniquely identified.

So unless you plan to do things like mark every possible role of plastic used by 3D printers... and mark every miniature motor... and every possible battery form...

Not to mention trying to keep a database of all the tracking numbers...

They can't even do it with guns and cars (though with a bit more success with cars).

Re:Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't say it would actually be effective. Just that I'm certain drones in the future will require serial numbers and 3D printers will require some unique fingerprinting. If only there were some way to make money off that...

Re:Informative

[tlhIngan]

Great. I now know that a company called âsecurity innovationsâ(TM) is basically a front for a bunch of marketing and PR muppets who will sell you some snake oil attached to whatever is the latest media feeding frenzy using fear and misinformation.

It's the way the industry works. If something is coming up and it's going to affect your core business, you have to react. And even if you have no science on your side, you do what has been done since the days of tobacco - you introduce doubt. Doubt the science. Doubt the seriousness, etc.

If you're looking for an interesting film, or a book to read, check out Merchants of Doubt, people whose entire lives are dedicated to manufacturing doubt by producing "controversy" or misinformation in an attempt to cloud the issue.

It started with tobacco, did the same to chemical manufacturers for fire retardants, and we see it today in climate change. The same playbook is in play everywhere now - manufacture doubt, especially if it threatens your core business.

I found a way to hack a human-driven car

[Anonymous Coward]

Shine with a laser pointer or strong flash light into the windshield of driving cars.

Re:I found a way to hack a human-driven car

[sectokia]

Yep same thing, this is not news worthy.... File this under obvious.

Yet another attack vector

[flux]

You can buy a simple point laser for less, for hacking the visual systems of the human driverâ"hopefully making the driver stop, but maybe at times not.

But the attack itself seems interesting, though it seems it is possible to fix the issue with new hardware. Good research!

Re:Yet another attack vector

[Derekloffin]

Indeed. While this might be interesting in the future, as is it is kinda a 'so what' kind of thing. Human drivers are even more easy to disorient and in generally far more seriously, and the car is just slowing down or coming to a halt, something you can also accomplish with putting a cheap obstacle in its path. Now, if they can get it to speed up or ignore obstacles then that would be concerning.

Re:Yet another attack vector

[michelcolman]

In the article they say that the pulses are not encoded or encrypted. Interesting, lidar works with very short pulses of laser light, how would one go about encoding or encrypting those? Is that even possible? Honest question, not saying it can't be done.

Re:Yet another attack vector

[tburkhol]

Interesting, lidar works with very short pulses of laser light, how would one go about encoding or encrypting those? Is that even possible?

Since timing is important, you just emit your pulses at random intervals and only pay attention to reflections within a relevant response window.

Re:Yet another attack vector

[michelcolman]

That is indeed a logical solution. But that's not really "encoding" or "encrypting" which the article seemed to suggest ("The pulses were not encoded or encrypted, which allowed him to simply replay them at a later point")

Re: Yet another attack vector

[Anonymous Coward]

Spread spectrum (time and frequency).

Re:Yet another attack vector

[Anonymous Coward]

You would not want to encode or encrypt them. What do you do if you get a fragment back that indicates an object? Ignore it because the return signal was corrupted? That seems unsafe. What they don't do is randomize them. The standard laser imagers spin at a constant rate. This type of attack could be eliminated by randomizing the frequency or pulse rate. Both are possible (maybe even trivial), but weren't necessary for the proof of concept phase. They should have looked at it before going live, but it still isn't a huge deal. It's the equivalent of a brake check. You have to be in front of them, and you make them think that you are closer or closing faster than you are. Not a big deal.

Apple is effected?

[SeaFox]

[citation needed]

At this point, Apple's auto project is still officially rumor and the idea of it being self-driving, and using LIDAR technology, has not been confirmed either.

Re:Apple is effected?

[SeaFox]

Dammit. I typed "effected" instead of "affected" when I quoted a line from the summary. -__-'

Re:Apple is effected?

[michelcolman]

Apple is not mentioned in the article, only in the summary. I think it's quite an amusing little addition, made me chuckle.

Re:Apple is effected?

[swb]

I doubt it matters, Apple isn't likely to enter the car business as an automaker anyway. This project is likely more about generating PR and building a futuristic car as a means to figure out how they can inject themselves into the cars of the future as a supplier.

Re:Apple is effected?

[michelcolman]

I think I agree. Making a car is hard. Joining the patent pool is a lot easier and just as lucrative. They may just be developing software and hardware to sell to actual automakers.

They still haven't gotten around to making TV sets either, just the little Apple TV box that sits underneath.

Re:Apple is effected?

[swb]

Ford lists $53 billion in property, plants and equipment on their balance sheet and a gross profit margin of about 15%.

Apple probably couldn't outsource the assembly of a car, they would have to make a major capital investment in assembly facilities. While they have the cash to do so, it doesn't seem likely that they would see this as a good business decision given the size of the investment and the low margin returns in the industry as a whole.

if the car is not molten slag

[Anonymous Coward]

You are using the wrong laser!

This sort of thing will be a problem

[Viol8]

Hopefully not with puppies! But you can just imagine kids pissing about pushing stuff in front of self driving cars and watching them do an emergency stop then just standing in front so it won't move and giving the occupants the finger. And to anyone who says they won't - kids already play chicken with human driven cars.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

As an asshole, it seems safer than the rock-against-windshield act I used to pull

captcha: apology

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[Sqr(twg)]

Exactly. Why would anyone spend $60 on electronics that (only) stops self-driving cars? If you need to stop cars for legitimate reasons, then a "stop" sign is sufficient. Self-driving cars are programmed to stop in a safe way when they encounter one of those (as are human drivers). If you want to stop cars because you're an asshole, then any reasonably large object will work on both self-driving and human-driven cars.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[AchilleTalon]

There is jail and police for these kids. The real problem is not with kids, it is with car hijackers, thefts and other criminals. Kids can be handled easily with the appropriate level of repression.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[Noughmad]

And if it's not a legitimate reason, the car has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.

Re: This sort of thing will be a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

More concerned about the police using (abusing) this to remotely shut down cars.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[gunslnger]

I think you're missing the point. Why would someone carry around a reasonably large object that would get them noticed when they could have a small piece of electronics?

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[Plumpaquatsch]

Hopefully not with puppies! But you can just imagine kids pissing about pushing stuff in front of self driving cars and watching them do an emergency stop then just standing in front so it won't move and giving the occupants the finger. And to anyone who says they won't - kids already play chicken with human driven cars.

Hey, that would be an improvement on kids throwing heavy objects off of bridges, sometimes killing occupants. Or using laser-pointers.

Re: This sort of thing will be a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

If your car still has a steering wheel, you can regain control. However, the result will probably be that someone dies, since that's usually what happens in one of those high speed chases, which the police loves so much.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[Applehu Akbar]

"watching them do an emergency stop then just standing in front so it won't move and giving the occupants the finger."

For autodrive cars that stray sufficiently far downtown, this will be how they get jacked.

Re: This sort of thing will be a problem

[WhatHump]

Why would anyone buy a laser pointer and shine it in a pilot's eyes? Same answer - because he can.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

WHY would they do either? Plus, you can kill somebody by dropping a reasonable size stone from an overpass onto a car. It has happened - though extremely rare. The cost of doing that is zero $$. The likelihood that someone would pay to attempt this is pretty low, plus the object itself is evidence of the crime. Laws exist to prevent this behavior because you can't make all these systems iron clad. Look at the lock on your house, it's not a vault door, you probably don't have cameras and alarms covering every inch of the place that protects your BODY. A reasonable and price-effective security is all you can demand of such systems. This is just more safety and security paranoia.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine is a locksmith that can get into a house in a few seconds because he has the know-how and the tools. Does this mean we should all have expensive security systems and doors to stop locksmiths from getting into the house? You can't live in this kind of fear. We probably need some laws and regulation when it comes to this brand new industry, but if we demand that they fix every possible point of attack on it, it will simply become ridiculously expensive or become a non-viable industry. Plus, is the rare possibility of such an "attack" really outweigh the potentially massive safety improvement of having automated driving? Doubt it.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome, nothing like getting your mug on camera to make the police's job easy. Why don't you just go down to your local bank and pull a gun and and stand in front of the camera flipping it off.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

If LiDAR makes it into more than just self driving cars then it is a good way for police to slow down/stop a vehicle.

Re:This sort of thing will be a problem

[dave420]

And the car-jackers get a car which will drive them to the nearest police station free of charge. I don't see your point.

Plus where the hell do you live where car jacking is still a thing? Robocop's Detroit in the 80s?

Re: This sort of thing will be a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't try that sh*t in China, where the prevailing attitude is "better to hit and kill than to hit and injure". Dead: one-time fine related to death expenses (burial, etc...). Injured: pain and suffering awards and cover rehab costs for life.

Apparently, drivers will actually back up over the victim to ensure death. To them, a short prison sentence for "accidental death" is preferable.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html

Is that really an issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

News flash, if you aim a laser at an airplane, you can crash it.
News flash, if you aim a laser at an automobile driver, you can crash it.
News flash, if you aim a magnetron at a cold meal, you can heat it! brah! did you know that?

Hack your ass, use toilet paper to conceal the fact you just went to the bathroom.

Vehicles interfering with each other?

[wvmarle]

So LiDAR sends out a laser beam, then looks at reflections. It makes sense this can be flooded - just pick up the signal and send it back amplified, and it seems there's something really close. I assume at least they're looking for brightness rather than timing (distance travelled is very short and light is very fast) to determine the distance of an object.

This makes me wonder. Would it be possible for cars to pick up signals from other cars, and react to them?

Anything to prevent this from happening - and so also prevent such a disturbance attack from working?

Re:Vehicles interfering with each other?

[wonkey_monkey]

I assume at least they're looking for brightness rather than timing (distance travelled is very short and light is very fast) to determine the distance of an object.

That sounds like a terrible idea. What happens if two objects reflect different amounts of laser light?

Light may be "very fast" but we're very good at measuring it.

Re:Vehicles interfering with each other?

[maeka]

I assume at least they're looking for brightness rather than timing (distance travelled is very short and light is very fast) to determine the distance of an object.

There are both time and phase-detect lidar systems on the market.

Re:Vehicles interfering with each other?

[maeka]

It makes sense this can be flooded

Flooding is very possible.

- just pick up the signal and send it back amplified, and it seems there's something really close.

But what you're describing there is impossible. By the time the light reaches you, the attacker, it is too late to create a false target which appears closer than you (assuming a time-detect lidar system). An attack must presuppose and be delivered before the target pulses are sent from the transmitter.

Re:Vehicles interfering with each other?

[swillden]

I assume at least they're looking for brightness rather than timing (distance travelled is very short and light is very fast) to determine the distance of an object.

They're not. It wouldn't work since the amplitude of reflections depends too much on the material, which the system doesn't know. As maeka mentioned, they use either direct time measurement or phase detection.

The timing really isn't a problem. Most off-the-shelf CPUs are easily capable of nanosecond-level time measurement and given that light travels about one foot in a nanosecond, they could give you roughly six-inch ranging accuracy. So it's not hard to create purpose-built timing circuits that can measure in the 10-100 picosecond range. For example this timer released in 2006 can measure time intervals up to 40sec in duration with a 10 psec resolution, which provides laser ranging accuracies of +-1 mm out to a distance of 1500m. I don't think there are yet any off-the-shelf femtosecond-precision timers, but I'm sure there will be within a few years, providing laser rangers with micrometer-level measurement.

We're accustomed to thinking of light as moving so fast that it's instantaneous across "human" distances. But that's only true at human timescales.

Re:Vehicles interfering with each other?

[wvmarle]

OK, OK so I made some technical errors in the first part of my post. That's understood, thanks for the replies.

Now I'd still love to hear whether car-car interference is possible, or why not, or how it could be prevented.

Re:Vehicles interfering with each other?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the timing. How fast do you think RADAR is?

After all, it moves at the same speed as light. The major improvement with light is the size of the obstacle that can be detected.

Re:Vehicles interfering with each other?

[swillden]

Well, early RADAR didn't measure range, it just gave a bearing. Then later generations used multiple receivers to triangulate to get ranging. Then they started measuring pulse return times, but at much larger distances than are practical with light, so timing didn't have to be as precise.

But, yes, if you were measuring the same sorts of distances that LIDAR does for self-driving cars, RADAR would have precisely the same timing requirements.

(Note that speed measurement RADAR guns don't actually need precise timing requirements because they don't measure distances. They measure the doppler shift by adding the return signal to the generated signal and looking for the peaks of the constructive interference, the "beats". That's a much easier measurement problem.)

A puppy is a REAL reason to stop

[Anonymous Coward]

These are no reason to stop for this confused signal, while a puppy is a real reason. The two situations are thus not comparable.

To be clear why, what if the signal is not of malicious intent? What if its a laser from another self driving car? What if its a laser used for other purposes? Like 3D mapping, lights shows or games?

So they have to encode their signals so they can tell their signals from others signals.

Re:A puppy is a REAL reason to stop

[rogerbly]

Standby for a brief poetry break!

Your Dog Dies
by Raymond Carver

it gets run over by a van.
you find it at the side of the road
and bury it.
you feel bad about it.
you feel bad personally,
but you feel bad for your daughter
because it was her pet,
and she loved it so.
she used to croon to it
and let it sleep in her bed.
you write a poem about it.
you call it a poem for your daughter,
about the dog getting run over by a van
and how you looked after it,
took it out into the woods
and buried it deep, deep,
and that poem turns out so good
you're almost glad the little dog
was run over, or else you'd never
have written that good poem.
then you sit down to write
a poem about writing a poem
about the death of that dog,
but while you're writing you
hear a woman scream
your name, your first name,
both syllables,
and your heart stops.
after a minute, you continue writing.
she screams again.
you wonder how long this can go on.

Not really news

[Chrisq]

It's possible to stop trains with even cheaper kits, and this hasn't been a major problem.

Not concerned

[jeti]

This sounds less dangerous than throwing a rock off a bridge.

This is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

So he floods the sensors with bad data, and the car stops safely...what is the issue here exactly?

Guy wastes his time developing a high tech way of making the car stop, when much simpler and cheaper ways are available?

Fuck everything

[Anonymous Coward]

So shining a laser in someone's eyes is now "carrying out a denial of service attack"?

Technical Definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems less like "hacking self-driving car sensors" and more like what we technically call "being a dick."

You're not thinking evil enough

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you not worried about this...You've not been spending enough time in your evil mastermind lair.

10 years time, with convoys of self driving cars taking up lanes of motorways and highways, how can you be the one to get that all important one car length ahead?
You've spent all that money on an expensive brand car, with the lux pack, drivers pack, safety pack, metallic paint, de-badged, surely you're more entitled to be in front than the guy in the basic no-name drone car?

Now you CAN! With the new 'LIDAR-TRAP-ATRON' Simply place this solar powered, self contained LIDAR trap at the side of the road. By sending out a constant stream of false LIDAR echos all the self-driving cars will be forced to slow down or stop. You in your prestige drivers car, fully under your control can sail past those sheeple in the their drone boxes. The open road can be yours!

Language

[argStyopa]

It's a tech-specific site, could we at least use tech-specific jargon correctly?
Hacking implies breaking into or somehow achieving a level of control. He didn't do that at all, he merely confused the sensors with a false-positive return, something long-since know in the elint world as "spoofing".

This researcher "hacked" nothing, he "spoofed" them.

Re:Language

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen, we lost the hacking/cracking war, and you'll lose this war too. Hacking is now an official media buzzword for "doing stuff". e.g.

I hacked my car by reinflating the tyres to the right pressure
I hacked my alarm to go go off at 7.30 today
I hacked my car door to open when I pull the handle firmly

Re:Language

[slinches]

That's exactly what I'd expect from tech journalists, a bunch of hacks.

Re:Language

[argStyopa]

What do I know, I still think there's actually a difference between a "drone" and "any remotely-controlled aircraft".

Not an issue if you stick to the legacy model

[Anonymous Coward]

http://i.imgur.com/Fb6MHw5.jpg

A useful application

[onthemightofprinces]

In other news, screaming into someone's ear when they're not expecting it might just make them jump.

"push-button pile-ups"

[careysb]

We're headed towards the age of "push-button pile-ups". (There, I coined a new phrase. Now go viral).

Re:"push-button pile-ups"

[Anonymous Coward]

How well does LIDAR work in high density environments?

Re:"push-button pile-ups"

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure the LIDAR would work fine there, but also pretty sure any self driving car would hit an exception case and just park.

Re:"push-button pile-ups"

[MrL0G1C]

People don't go flashing bright lights into drivers eyes. People don't jam GPS signals, people don't jam radio signals, people don't throw poison into water supplies. And people won't spend thousands and wonder round shining high-tech lasers into cars.

Re:"push-button pile-ups"

[Anonymous Coward]

... People don't jam GPS signals, people don't jam radio signals...

Yes they do. I deal with these people every week and it's only getting worse.

Friendly vs. unfriendly environment

[gweihir]

Ordinary engineering and typical engineers assume a friendly environment, i.e. the absence of intentional sabotage and hacking. This state of affairs is not true with globally networked infrastructure and sensors operating outside of protected spaces. What these people lack is what Bruce Schneier calls "the security mind-set". It involves not only thinking about how things can be made to work, but also how they can be intentionally broken and subverted. Having it is critical. That most people designing software and software-driven systems these days do not have it the main reason why IT security is in such an abysmally bad state these days.

Re:Friendly vs. unfriendly environment

[Anonymous Coward]

You may be partially right, but in general I think it's more that we have to accept a level of insecurity in some systems in order to be cost effective. What kind of lock and security system is on your house/apartment? It could probably be vastly better if you wanted to spend a lot of money on it. Most people are fine with a lock and deadbolt even though they can be defeated in seconds by an "expert". With that, we are talking about your physical safety and the fact most of us make the inexpensive choice because the probability of attack is low should tell you something. Security should be built into systems and more expansive security systems should be used when the probably of an attack is most high. In the physical world we see this. Banks have a lot of security. Businesses typically have cameras/alarms. Homes have a relatively inexpensive security. No reason to think IT systems wouldn't mimic this to keep costs in line with the customer.

True, true..

[Anonymous Coward]

You can also distract airplane and helicopter pilots by shining lasers on their cockpits, but that's very much illegal. It would probably be easy to detect afterwards from built-in telemetry data if someone disrupted the sensors with something. If the worst happens, the person responsible for interfering with the sensors might be, depending on the level of intentionality, charged with manslaughter or murder.

You can jam GPS, radars and just about every other sensor relying on external input, but people don't do this because it carries heavy penalties.

Breaking news: Hackers hack human sensors

[iceco2]

They forced a self driving car to stop, wow. Is it any harder to blind a human driver causing him to hit the breaks?
Use a search light or lasers, or a pretty woman flashing her breasts.
This is hardly a "hack" and definitely not a weakness of self driving cars compared to the human variant.

Re:Breaking news: Hackers hack human sensors

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen this posted several times and I tend to think people like you don't really get the problem. Okay, if you blind a self driving car, what's going to happen? The car is going to stop. It's a machine, it's predictable, you can guess with good certainty what is going to happen.

Now, you blind a human driver, what's going to happen? You really don't know. You can't say they're going to stop, because otherwise all west bound traffic would come to a screeching halt every evening as the sun goes down, yet that doesn't happen. It's the predictability which becomes the problem. You don't step out in front of a human controlled car, because you're pretty sure it's going to stop, but there's always the distinct possibility the person isn't paying attention and won't. This all becomes issues when talking about criminals or mischief makers trying to cause havoc. Predictability is key.

Re:Breaking news: Hackers hack human sensors

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, an intelligent comment explaining why this is an issue, as opposed to all the retards saying 'this is exactly like blinding/stepping in front of a human driver'.

Re:Breaking news: Hackers hack human sensors

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention - the ability to stop all cars around you in a completely untraceable way. Idiotic to compare this to throwing a rock at a car. That's like saying hacking online bank accounts is the same as pointing a gun at a teller.

Tinfoil

[WPIDalamar]

Just put tinfoil over your sensors. Problem solved.

Old tech

[Lumpy]

You can buy those to flood the front of your car to screw with police LIDAR so they cant get a reading on you or they only read 0. Except mine has a 1 mile range.

for $60, is he doing it from 1 mile down the road? I bet his only works from a hundred feet away.

$60?

[DrXym]

It would be trivial and cheap to halt these cars - a box, a trash bag, or a bit of carpet would probably do the trick for $0. A fact which I'm sure criminals would soon figure out, assuming such vehicles ever see the light of day.

They already can

[Anonymous Coward]

Any vehicle with an OnStar system provides the means to remotely disable it.

Not necessarily

[Anonymous Coward]

A puppy is a real reason to stop, or swerve, only if you can do so safely. That means nobody following too close behind and nobody in lanes to either side of you (or oncoming).

You do always keep enough situational awareness to know this, right?

Otherwise it's the puppy's tough luck. Cute doesn't beat over 88,000 foot-pounds per second of momentum (2000 lb car moving 30mph (44 fps). Whether that's your car or the car behind/beside you is up to you.

Re:Not necessarily

[tehcyder]

A puppy is a real reason to stop, or swerve, only if you can do so safely.

You should always be driving safely, which is to say defensively. Riding a motorcycle for a while soon knocks this habit into you.

Dollar store laser pointer stops "real drivers"

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all this isn't "hacking"

If I shine a spotlight or laser in your face while you are driving am I hacking into you? If I rip the security cameras off your house, am I hacking into your house? Or even better, if I spray paint your windshield, am I hacking into your car?

For only a few dollars I can pick up a laser pointer (or rip a laser diode out of the many products they are in) and point it at a "real" driver. This will not only make them slow down or abruptly stop but also cause accidents due to their spontaneous reactions and possibly blind the driver. So I don't see why this matters. Especially since I would assume that these navigation systems have certain backups like cameras, RADAR and ultrasonic sensors. No one in their right mid would buy (or even sell) a self driving car that doesn't have systems that work in multiple scenarios. This is just a simple test case of a small problem that needs to be fixed. It is not hacking and it is not a security issue.

Now if they were able to communicate with an on-board computer via the LIDAR system, that would be cool.

Hah.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can imagine if for some reason you are under attack and need to get away fast.
Then one of the assailant just step in front of the vehicle, the vehicle stops, and you're dead or captured.

What a marvelous system.

Manual cars suffer from a related vulnerability

[nneonneo]

Manual car sensors can also be hacked! Shining bright lights at the windshield, especially in nighttime driving conditions, incapacitates the optical sensor of a manually-driven car. Worse, unlike self-driving cars, manual cars behave erratically or unpredictably in these conditions. Even worse, all cars are equipped with hardware that can generate these bright lights, meaning that any car can attack any other manual car in vision range.

Cars are doomed!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

business v tech

[Smiddi]

Its the standard business versus technology model: Rush to market THEN consider the security and privacy implications.

Recent development in Laser optomechanics is a fix

[dsmatthews9379]

Plus a bit of coding (literally) on the pulses, and given the new units will be so small more than one operating out of phase should allow for majority decisions that override a minority of jammed channels.

Not sure how affected Google is going to be given Ray already knows about this,

http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-...

http://www.nature.com/articles...

Basketball

[bradgoodman]

Throw a basketball at LiDAR -based car, or even a "traditional" human-operated one, and they both will see an object coming at them at a high rate of speed. If I write an article about it, will Slashdot post that, too?

Re:Basketball

[Triklyn]

sometimes you don't need them to stop, just stay for a bit.

ever hit those points in your commute, where you're through it, and you're like, wtf was that? why the hell did everybody just slow down to 10 mph for half a mile?

now imagine that, but because some teenager got bored one day and just decided to waste everybody's time for 30 minutes to see if he could.

now imagine it's election day during a tight race, and people can't get to the polls in heavily (insert your party color here) (red, blue, green, etc.) districts. And hey, it's untraceable, and hey, nobody lost anything, but a bit of time, and maybe some votes.

Counter measures

[Anonymous Coward]

* Fire a sufficiently high-powered laser back at the interfering source.
* Document the incident (photo/video and LiDar measurements) and alert the cops automatically. Messing with infrastructure is a criminal act, right?