Researchers fool self-driving car Into dodging imaginary hurdles

Scientists from France and Germany have demonstrated that self-driving cars can be tricked into avoiding imaginary objects or crashing into real ones.

A paper accessed on 23 September details the research which was carried out at a university parking lot.

Using two techniques known as Object Removal Attack (ORA) and Object Addition Attack (OAA), they showed that anyone can fool self-driving cars using ordinary mirrors.

A look at LiDAR

Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) are sensors used to guide the movement of autonomous vehicles. The technology helps the vehicles to detect obstacles in their way from several meters away and avoid them.

However, it is known to have problems with reflective surfaces, so the researchers carried out an experiment to see how mirrors can trick the cars.

Using Object Removal Attack (ORA), a technique that uses mirrors of various sizes to cover a traffic cone, they adjusted the size and position of the mirrors to completely mask the obstacle to the LIDAR system, and predicted that the mirrors could obscure the car’s line of sight.

Secondly, they used Object Addition Attack (OAA) which uses small mirror tiles to make the car detect an imaginary obstacle it needed to avoid. 

As predicted, the car spotted the fake obstacle 20 meters away and avoided the non-existent problem, causing the scientists to conclude that an adversary can inject phantom obstacles or erase real ones using only inexpensive mirrors.

“Experiments on a full AV platform, with commercial-grade LIDAR and the Autoware stack, demonstrate that these are practical threats capable of triggering critical safety failures, such as abrupt emergency braking and failure to yield.”

The tests were conducted in various scenarios and the researchers found that the OAA scheme could deter a car from making a legal turn in traffic by using a variety of mirror selections.

They also found that mirrors could hide objects in an ORA attack even better, as the reflective surfaces’ positioning hid obstacles from cars regardless of mirror angles.

However, the study was conducted at a speed well below that on a regular free way, so it isn’t conclusive if mirrors can actually be used to attack autonomous vehicles until further studies are carried out.