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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.
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.
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.