Many autonomous carsuse LIDAR — a kind of laser - based radiolocation — to sense the world around them . But now a investigator has developed a childlike organisation that can arse around the equipment into date objects where really none exist .
Spectrum reportsthat Jonathan Petit , fromSecurity Innovation , has developed a system of rules to institutionalise misbegotten sign toward the LIDAR sensor used in self - drive cars . Consisting of a depressed - power optical maser and a pulse source , powered by a Raspberry Pi or Arduino , the kit can be as little as $ 60 t0 make . The hardware can be used to capture the light reflections from an obstruction and then send them toward the sensors that sit on top of self-governing vehicle , as shown in the image above . Heexplains to Spectrum :
“ I can take reverberation of a bastard railway car and put them at any location I want . And I can do the same with a pedestrian or a rampart … I can burlesque thousands of object and essentially carry out a denial of service attack on the tracking system so it ’s not able-bodied to track real object . ”
In tests , the home - brewage system worked at length of up to 100 meters from the sensor , at all slant , and did n’t always require a direct hit of the twist to achieve its finish . It could in theory be used to slow autonomous car by fooling them into thinking object were sat in the middle of the road — or even paralyse their organisation with the sort of DDoS attack that Petit refer to .
Petit claimsthat manufacturers of such LIDAR sensors — admit the likes of IBEO and Velodyne — have n’t thought enough about the possible action of such attacks . In possibility it should be potential to encrypt or encode the signaling to overcome such a problem but currently such processes are n’t in situation — making synchronization of the pulses the only real challenge .
Right now the job wo n’t touch too many people . But it ’s areminder that security should be a significant business for auto - makers — and it ’s time for them to do something about it .
[ Spectrum ]
Image by Google
HacksLidarSecuritySelf - push auto
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