A malicious technology can trick self-driving cars into “hallucinating” phantom vehicles and veering dangerously off-course to get out of their way, researchers have discovered.
The new hack, dubbed “MadRadar,” can also hide real cars from on-vehicle radar sensors and fool a self-driving car into thinking a real car has jerked off course. The scientists reported their findings in a peer-reviewed paper, which will be presented Feb. 26 at the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024 in San Diego.
“Without knowing much about the targeted car’s radar system, we can make a fake vehicle appear out of nowhere or make an actual vehicle disappear in real-world experiments,” lead author Miroslav Pajic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University in North Carolina, said in a statement. “We’re not building these systems to hurt anyone, we’re demonstrating the existing problems with current radar systems to show that we need to fundamentally change how we design them.”
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