There have been a lot of debate about such cars and the
impact they will create to the society.
If you have been eagerly waiting for the days that you can
sir at the back of your car watching a movie while your car takes the ride, you
may want to pull that break.
A security researcher has found a simple homemade laser
gadget that can easily disrupt automated vehicles.
Self-driving cars such as those perused by Alphabet’s Google X division use lidar-
light radar- as their ‘eyes’, a laser is fired and the light reflected from the
objects it hits is analyzed, measuring the distance between the vehicle and the
obstacles. This helps with path making and collision detection, but the system
can cost tens of thousands dollars. Yet the researcher, Jonathan Petit says
he’s found away to fool them for around $79.
Petit, head scientist at software company security
innovation and the former research fellow at the University of Cork, combined a
mass-market laser with a homemade pulse generator into a device capable of
spoofing vehicles. The kitbashed tool creates ghost vehicles that trick the
autonomous vehicle lidar, giving the impression of other cars, walls, or
pedestrians are in the way. The result could vary from slowdown to complete
stoppage.
“I can spoof thousands of objects and basically carry out a
denial of service attack on the tracking system so it’s not able to track real
objects,” Petit said to BBC.
Think making, a pulse generator would be too tricky for the
average hacker? Think again. You can easily do it with Raspberry Pi or an
Arduino said Petit.
Petit will be presenting his work in full at Black Hat
Europe, a security conference taking place in Amsterdam.
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