As driverless cars head onto regular street scenes, experts have begun warning that the attached cars could be vulnerable to hackers who can take control of the vehicles. from a distance. While most of these warnings are related to sneaking into the computer connected to the on-board internet, there is an analog way to disrupt the operation of a driverless car, also, as Autoblog reports. Researchers from across the U.S. recently figured out how to make a driverless car with a set of stickers, as explained in a paper posted on arXiv.org.
They explored how fiddling with the appearance of driverless car stop signs could redirect, trying its sensors and cameras to think of a stop sign as a speed limit sign for a 45 mile per hour zone, for instance.
They found out by creating a mask to cover the sign that looks almost identical to the sign itself (so humans might not notice the difference) , that they could deceive the classification of a road sign as those that driverless cars would use to read the sign out 100 percent of the time.
In a test of a right-handed sign, a mask that filled the arrow on the sign reached a 100 percent declassification rate. In two-thirds of the trials, the right-hand switch was identified as a stop sign, and in a third, it was mislabeled as an additional blade sign. Graffiti-like stickers that read “love” and “hate” bothered the sailor to read a stop sign as a speed limit sign most of the time, as did an abstract design where just put a few block-shaped stickers on the sign. .
“We accept that, with similar signs to warning signs, beats are small enough to counter the classifier,” they write.
The study suggests that hackers would not need much equipment to damage a driverless car. If they knew the algorithm of the car’s visual system, they would need a printer or some stickers to deceive the car.
However, the attacks could be damaged if the cars have multi-sensors fail-safe chests and take into account the context (how the car is driving in a city- large or on a highway) while reading signs, as Autoblog notes.
[h/t Autoblog]