MadRadar attack causes automotive radar to 'hallucinate'

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/duke-universitys-madradar-attack-causes-automotive-radar-to-hallucinate/

by reteltech • 2 years ago

67 60 2 years ago

blibble• 2 years ago

given car companies seem incapable of securing something as basic as a car key

how long until smart 12 year olds can remotely hijack major car brands on a freeway with a laptop and a small python script?

FractalParadigm• 2 years ago

Realistically, it's been possible on and off for quite some time. Chrysler's UConnect system received quite a bit of flak some years back over just how easy it was to take over full control of a vehicle[0]; not just locking/unlocking doors, but full control over the climate system and wipers, all the way up to starting and stopping the engine or changing gear in the transmission.

[0] https://jalopnik.com/chryslers-uconnect-vulnerable-to-remote...

rightbyte3• 2 years ago

That is why steer by wire steering is terrifying. If your car turn full left due to some hack or bug at some speed trigger you are dead. And the industry push it as cost cutting.

tetromino_• 2 years ago

Did you know that fully analogue human-piloted cars are vulnerable? Researchers have recently described the "MadBrick attack": 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.

snapplebobapple• 2 years ago

Thats a little different in that the car wont override what ypu tell it to do from the brick attck but it potentially will for thw above attck.

fipar3• 2 years ago

This has been addressed already, though not by manufacturers. If you live (or drive through) an area where brick attacks are known to happen, you just put protective films on the windshield. It usually still ends up damaged but you can continue to drive just fine (I know because I have).

rightbyte3• 2 years ago

Really? It helps against a brick?

ck2• 2 years ago

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?

GlenTheMachine2• 2 years ago

Spoofing radar signals isn't exactly new, and the ability to do it on the ground (so to speak) shouldn't be surprising. The military has been doing it for decades.

Also, it doesn't take nearly the sophistication of the system demo'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.

nine_k• 2 years ago

A large cloud of glitter would do the same for optical systems, e.g. human drivers. Shining intense light at drivers is also known to cause havoc and incidents. Now imagine a night road lit by a dancing hall light show; many human drivers would find themselves discombobulated.

shiroiuma2• 2 years ago

Shining intense light at drivers is also known to cause havoc and incidents.

This is absolutely normal when driving on American roads at night these days.

derstander2• 2 years ago

Spoofing radar signals isn't exactly new, and the ability to do it on the ground (so to speak) shouldn't be surprising. The military has been doing it for decades.

People who are interested in finding out more can look up Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) jammers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio_frequency_memory

I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but the link's assertion that any of these techniques are new suggests that either allaboutcircuits is not familiar with radar/electronic attack or that Duke University and/or the automative radar folks are not up to speed with techniques used in radar/electronic attack in the defense/aerospace industries. Maybe it's the latter, as the arXiv preprint states "...show the novel ability to effectively ‘add’ (i.e., false positive attacks), ‘remove’ (i.e., false negative attacks), or ‘move’ (i.e., translation attacks) object detections...".

These are open data, too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_jamming_and_deception.

The arXiv preprint doesn't list any of the usual suspects for radar or electronic attack sources that I would expect to see in its references. There are a lot of automotive radar sources and, interestingly enough, some LiDAR and LiDAR adversarial attacks instead.

euroderf• 2 years ago

What are the frequencies here ? Can it all be done with SDR ?

lend000• 2 years ago

Even ignoring the possibility of intentional jamming, I wonder if the increase in radar-equipped cars will start causing significant interference in other cars' operations. Every once in a while I get a phantom "brake!" signal when there is nothing in front of me.

daft_pink• 2 years ago

Just about every Toyota sold in the past few years has a radar unit on its bumper. Pretty sure if there was going to be interference naturally from a lot of vehicles, we would have seen it already.

dosman334• 2 years ago

I think what's important here is not this first low-level stab at manipulating car radar systems. It makes a beach head on what adversaries can possibly do and demonstrates that manufacturers need to try harder.

xyzzy123• 2 years ago

I wonder how much effort is warranted though.

If people want to mess up traffic they can drop a concrete block off an overpass, run a heavy chain across the road, change signage, use tire shredders or do any number of antisocial things. Many of which are extremely cheap and not preventable.

Probably the most novel factor would be that sensor disruption is more deniable than many other threats to drivers.

But how much additional cost/expense would that justify? Technically mitigating every risk isn't really possible, at some point you have to fall back to the legal system.

trklausss• 2 years ago

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.

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.

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.

iknowstuff3• 2 years ago

Exactly why Tesla switched to vision only

smilespray• 2 years ago

Nah, that was cost.

dosman334• 2 years ago

What'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't see the sides of your car without tilting your head a little. You don't need to see your own car in your side mirrors.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131074/how-to-adjus...

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't exist. I don'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'm curious if that actually deactivates the radar emitter or just stops alerting me to hits.

chinathrow• 2 years ago

This - and turning your head when changing lanes in vehicles without proper curved side mirrors save lifes too.

kolinko• 2 years ago

Also, mirrors that curve near the far end.

Each time I visit US I'm frustrated by the american cars having flat mirrors. The blind spots are insane. I guess it's due to some weird regulation?

In EU mirrors have their last 2-4cm curved, and there's virtually no blind spot, and you don't need to adjust mirrors too precisely even.

gray_-_wolf• 2 years ago

In EU

Definitely not everywhere in the EU. My Yaris has flat mirrors.

viraptor2• 2 years ago

I don't need it, because I now keep my side mirrors set correctly I know where cars are beside me before the radar knows.

It's not there to replace you looking. It's there as an extra information source in case you make a mistake when looking. Maybe you're lucky with the your car, but even with curved ends of mirrors in mine, there's still a blind spot where I would not see a bike on the passenger's side and the little extra notification is great for that. It blinks for guard rails too, but that doesn't bother me - there's extremely rarely a reason to check the mirror on the side close to the rail.

dosman334• 2 years ago

I didn't say the radar was there to replace looking. All you do is set your mirrors correctly and then there's no more blind spot. That's the entire point of the radar system, to "fix" the alleged blind spot problem. The problem doesn't exist if people were just taught how to properly adjust their mirrors in the first place.

there's extremely rarely a reason to check the mirror on the side close to the rail.

...

Animats• 2 years ago

That'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.

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's noise.

superkuh• 2 years ago

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.

numlock86• 2 years ago

People rediscover radar attack that has been known and fixed over six decades ago.

Amazing. We've gone full circle now. I wonder if this is a problem of generational differences in knowledge transfer ... or rather the lack of it.

rightbyte3• 2 years ago

Worker attrition is way too high nowadays to keep deep knowledge in niche fields I believe. Old school seniors have retired and are being replaced by nobody.

You can notice this in a lot of hardware products with "noob" mistakes that the prior product generation did not have etc. Software is probably the same but the product is too opaque to see into so ot just feels crappy.

Metacelsus• 2 years ago

Turns out calculus was invented in 1994: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...

csours• 2 years ago

Pointing lasers at people's eyes causes degradation of visual acuity

foxyv• 2 years ago

There are some really ingenious ways to make a self driving vehicle that won't collide with other vehicles. But they all end up just becoming a train/trolley.

Steering? Rails.

Anti-collision? Signals.

Fuel/Charging? Overhead power lines.

MadRadar attack causes automotive radar to 'hallucinate'

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