MadRadar attack causes automotive radar to 'hallucinate'

That&#x27;s a problem with simple, cheap Doppler radars. Pulse radars are much less jammable and countermeasures against jamming are well understood. A bit of random jitter in the outgoing pulse timing prevents interference from identical systems, as well as synchronization attacks. Military radars have had this since the 1960s. It does add cost.<p>LIDAR has the same problem and the same countermeasures. Pulsed LIDAR units should have a few microseconds of random jitter in the pulse timing, too. You can still get a collision, but not multiple consistent collisions in a row, so you know it&#x27;s noise.

Spoofing radar signals isn&#x27;t exactly new, and the ability to do it on the ground (so to speak) shouldn&#x27;t be surprising. The military has been doing it for decades.<p>Also, it doesn&#x27;t take nearly the sophistication of the system demo&#x27;ed here -- a chaff canister released into traffic would, I imagine, play twenty kinds of havoc on any autonomous driving system that relied on radar.

What&#x27;s funny is that so much effort is going into these radar systems for non-autonomous vehicular systems that can be resolved by teaching people how to correctly set their side mirrors to cover their blind spots. You eliminate your blind spots by moving your side mirrors out enough that you can&#x27;t see the sides of your car without tilting your head a little. You don&#x27;t need to see your own car in your side mirrors.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caranddriver.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;a15131074&#x2F;how-to-adjust-your-mirrors-to-avoid-blind-spots&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.caranddriver.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;a15131074&#x2F;how-to-adjus...</a><p>After I got my most recent vehicle I discovered it has a 24GHz rear-facing radar in order to alert me to a possible car in my blind spots. It misfires all the time and alerts me to guard rails and phantoms that don&#x27;t exist. I don&#x27;t need it, because I now keep my side mirrors set correctly I know where cars are beside me before the radar knows. I turn it off but now I&#x27;m curious if that actually deactivates the radar emitter or just stops alerting me to hits.

I got a Volkswagen with front assist and adaptive cruise control. I use it mainly for long runs with little traffic, that way my foot doesn’t get cramped for staying at the same position.<p>When crossing under some bridges, sometimes it decelerates and warns me of a collision, even if there is no one there. I have to override it by stepping on the gas pedal until I’m through.<p>I’ve also felt it hiccup on a test strip where they were testing radars, I was guessing it was due to them using similar frequencies, but I’m not sure on that one.

&gt; People rediscover radar attack that has been known and fixed over six decades ago.<p>Amazing. We&#x27;ve gone full circle now. I wonder if this is a problem of generational differences in knowledge transfer ... or rather the lack of it.

given car companies seem incapable of securing something as basic as a car key<p>how long until smart 12 year olds can remotely hijack major car brands on a freeway with a laptop and a small python script?

It goes the other way too. My city has installed a large number of radar detection cross walk lights. You can tell when a car with radar goes down a street because they progressively trigger each cross walk light despite there being no people. There are certain times a year when the sun is in just the right position in the morning to cause them to stay permanently on for hours as well.

Did you know that fully analogue human-piloted cars are vulnerable? Researchers have recently described the &quot;MadBrick attack&quot;: a malicious attacker can remotely disable a human-piloted car or cause it to veer off road by dropping a brick through the windshield from an overpass. Clearly, car manufacturers need to promptly address this class of vulnerabilities.

Pointing lasers at people&#x27;s eyes causes degradation of visual acuity

There are some really ingenious ways to make a self driving vehicle that won&#x27;t collide with other vehicles. But they all end up just becoming a train&#x2F;trolley.<p>Steering? Rails.<p>Anti-collision? Signals.<p>Fuel&#x2F;Charging? Overhead power lines.

Does the trick with tape on the ground causing Teslas to steer into walls still work or did they patch that for all the ignorant alpha testers out there?