Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t an issue with no. 2 that bad actors could spoof or inject bad data and cause problems for cars reading this data in good faith. You can discard one abnormal data point but not if it’s coordinated.

View on HN

Do you worry about some random asshole kid hurling a re-bar in to rush hour traffic? REing automotive tech, setting up transmitters, and spoofing traffic data to throw a virtual re-bar in to rush hour traffic could become a pandemic unless we figure out a way to fight such attacks.

relevant: https://xkcd.com/1958/

The difference between these two scenarios is that the asshole kid throwing rebar is easily detectable and to do it has to be at the location of the crime.

The asshole spoofing traffic data, depending on how the transmitters are set up could potentially do it from a long distance away, and may actually be hard to detect.

Emergency vehicles in some cities can emit a signal that changes lights from red to green. It's a felony to spoof those devices, but people still get caught doing it.

I'm sure a system can be made resilient to a single bad actor, but, yes, those attack vectors will have to be thought through.

Forgetting to use your turn signal, or leaving it on, or running at night without headlights, is "injecting bad data" into the present system.

Yes. But that’s why you need the model and the car-centric sensors. “Trust but verify.”

Trust but verify

Thanks. I was on the phone and autocorrect got me.

If they need to verify, why do they need to talk to peer-vehicle sensors? Ideally what would happen is a car a quarter mile ahead gives the cars behind a heads up that something is different (construction, ladder or junk, stalled car ahead, icy conditions, etc.) but if this look ahead dats isn’t reliable of at least can’t be trusted, what are you verifying it against? Not your own sensors cuz then why even get this fleet data to begin with?

It can at least bias your priors ahead of time. When you (as a human) are using Waze or Google maps and you see a speed trap ahead of you, or a traffic jam, or construction or whatever, obviously you can't blindly trust that. But you can slow down and prepare, and if and when that occurrence comes to pass, you're better prepared to deal with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com