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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

You have to get pretty deep into the article to get to these two lines:

>Any product or service that uses the public GPS broadcast system can be affected by GPS spoofing... this research doesn’t demonstrate any Tesla-specific vulnerabilities

>The effect of GPS spoofing on Tesla cars is minimal and does not pose a safety risk

It would of course be better if Tesla vehicles weren't vulnerable to this type of attack, but the headline and much of the article has potential to be very misleading to someone who doesn't completely understand what is going on here.

EDIT: I stand by the general point of this comment. However I did miss the context of the quotes I included here. See nirvdrum's comment and my reply.

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I'm not sure those two lines really support your conclusion. They may, but they're both taken from Tesla's response to a previous test performed with the Model S. If you read further on, the researchers take issue with Tesla's response, particularly the part about it not posing a safety risk:

> The fact that spoofing causes unforeseen results like unintentional acceleration and deceleration, as we’ve shown, clearly demonstrates that GNSS spoofing raises a safety issue that must be addressed

You are right that I was mistakenly quoting a quote. I was skimming the article and was thrown off by the inconsistent formatting. Some of the multi-paragraph quotes are indented to identify them as block quotes. The sections I was quoting from just had a quotation mark at the start then three paragraphs later another quotation mark to end the quote.

Tesla vehicles can likely be made less vulnerable to this attack than even human drivers navigating via cell-phone GPS since Tesla has inertial measurement units.

They are likely 'trusting' GPS signal over IMU currently, but that could be changed via software. Or at least alert if the signals disagree.

You don't even need GPS spoofing for drivers to get it wrong: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/6646331.stm

How well does the camera and radar cope with a radar transparent sheet with off-ramp lines painted on it? There's a Wyle E. Coyote scenario of hanging that off the side of a mountain road.

I mean, if you switch out robots with humans, I'd venture a guess that still half of them would fall for it the same way.

True, but it's a vulnerability to any self-driving car that depends on GPS. Cars with a human in the loop just nope out.

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