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You Can Trick Self-Driving Cars By Defacing Street Signs (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: A team of eight researchers has discovered that by altering street signs, an adversary could confuse self-driving cars and cause their machine-learning systems to misclassify signs and take wrong decisions, potentially putting the lives of passengers in danger. The idea behind this research is that an attacker could (1) print an entirely new poster and overlay it over an existing sign, or (2) attach smaller stickers on a legitimate sign in order to fool the self-driving car into thinking it's looking at another type of street sign. While scenario (1) will trick even human observers and there's little chance of stopping it, scenario (2) looks like an ordinary street sign defacement and will likely affect only self-driving vehicles. Experiments showed that simple stickers posted on top of a Stop sign fooled a self-driving car's machine learning system into misclassifying it as a Speed Limit 45 sign from 67% to 100% of all cases. Similarly, gray graffiti stickers on a Right Turn sign tricked the self-driving car into thinking it was looking at a Stop sign. Researchers say that authorities can fight such potential threats to self-driving car passengers by using an anti-stick material for street signs. In addition, car vendors should also take into account contextual information for their machine learning systems. For example, there's no reason to have a certain sign on certain roads (Stop sign on an interstate highway).
"...there's no reason to have a certain sign on certain roads (Stop sign on an interstate highway)."
What about here? (Cross Island Parkway, New York USA, Exit 31)
Stop signs often do appear on highway entry ramps, especially where they are short. This is true in construction areas, as well as on some older entrance ramps around New York City.
Technically this is a 50 MPH (~80 km/h) Parkway and not an Interstate, but rather than randomly searching the area this was the first that came to mind.
For example, there's no reason to have a certain sign on certain roads (Stop sign on an interstate highway).
Except during road construction when a signman holds up a "stop" sign and the self-driving car says "You're not fooling me! There are no stop signs on freeways, and even your 15mph speed limit sign is fake, my database says the speed limit here is 75mph. See ya!"
I believe the merits of the paper lie in demonstrating this as a theoretical concern
But that is important, because without this research, the teams of professional engineers designing SDCs would have never even considered that a traffic sign could be smudged or obscured by a tree branch.