The idea of hacking a car—taking control of important vehicle functions while the vehicle is operating—isn’t new. Over the last few years, as automakers cram more technology into vehicles, there’s a growing concern over nefarious parties hacking a vehicle. Such an incident could be deadly. In 2016, General Motors launched HackerOne to find vulnerabilities susceptible to hacking in its various systems. Last year, GM offered a bug bounty program to weed out other vulnerabilities. As electric, autonomous, and connected vehicles become the norm, there’s an increased risk for hacking. However, there are ways to minimize such a catastrophe.Â
Researchers at Georgia Tech and Multiscale Systems Inc. will present results of a new study that looked at the “cyber-physical” risks of hacked internet-connected cars, according to Forbes, to the 2019 American Physical Society March meeting. The study looks at the real-world results of what would happen if hackers took control of internet-connected vehicles. The study saw that when 10 to 20 percent of vehicles at rush hour became hacked, half the city became inaccessible from the rest. That could not only cause significant headaches, but possibly real-world injuries and deaths.
Such a scenario borders on science fiction, but hackers have, in the past, hacked into vehicle systems such as door locks, air conditioning, and radio controls. Those are minor systems in a vehicle, but as automakers push for V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) and V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure) technologies while also increasing new advanced driver assistance systems where the vehicle can change speed, stop, accelerate, and turn without human intervention, the likelihood of those systems being susceptible to hacking increases.Â
It’s not all doom-and-gloom, though. According to Skanda Vivek, a postdoctoral researcher in the Peter Yunker lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, there are ways to minimize such vulnerabilities. One such technique is the use of multiple networks to decrease the number of cars that could be compromised by a single hacking occurrence. This would minimize the likelihood of a large-scale commuting disaster. Security will be key as automakers push forward with connected, autonomous, and electric cars, especially as they try to convince the public they are safe.Â
Even as Cruise Automation appears to be making progress navigating its autonomous vehicles through San Francisco roads in an attempt to solve a century-old problem, new threats have undoubtedly emerged with the advancement of technology, posing new problems.
Comments
Studies say some conclusions reached by some studies do not require studies but instead the brain cells of a canary or better.
I do not understand why the industry is spending resources and money on autonomous vehicles.
I’ll admit to being overly cynical, but i see what I think are at least 2 major hurdles.
The first is the insurance lobby, which is huge. A fully autonomous vehicle – to be safe – is going to have collision recognition and avoidance systems which would take an event like a meteor falling from the sky to overload. There also won’t be any traffic infractions to generate higher insurance rates or even higher rates for young, inexperienced drivers. No accidents, no insurance rates at a premium due to high risk drivers; does anyone really think that when the insurance companies wake up and realize the potential for revenue lost they won’t have their lobbyists whispering in politician’s ears to kill the program ?
The second is simply taking the first and expanding it a bit to the revenue lost by municipalities etc due to no traffic infractions. No more speeding tickets, parking tickets, DUI’s. Red light cameras and photo speed traps will be unnecessary because autonomous vehicles will be programmed to not do anything wrong. No more revenue from traffic citations.
Same question as before; when the govt. realizes the amount of money they’re going to lose, do we really think they’re going to allow it ?
I’m trying not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but between both the govt and big insurance staring at a huge loss in revenue I can’t believe we’ll ever see autonomous vehicles in anything other than very limited numbers in closed environments.
Am I missing something ?
It won’t matter if it’s safer imo, by making the responsible party the one with the deep pockets, a handful of wrecks will result in exorbitant litigation costs. Fault or no fault, it’ll be up to jury, the lawyers know it and will eat them alive. CA already has set the precedent to hold the manufacturer responsible.
“The second is simply taking the first and expanding it a bit to the revenue lost by municipalities etc due to no traffic infractions. No more speeding tickets, parking tickets, DUI’s. Red light cameras and photo speed traps will be unnecessary because autonomous vehicles will be programmed to not do anything wrong. No more revenue from traffic citations.”
If your city’s budget is broken by falling below a threshold of issued tickets for infractions and fines, then your city is corrupt.
Fine are not a revenue stream. They are a deterrent to that discourages destructive or irresponsible behaviour.
Cities are not supposed to be run like a business. They are supposed to be an environment where people and business want to live or work in. Cities are supposed to operate in a manner that promotes a quality of life that appeals to the greatest number of people, not on the balance of quarterly results.
Well, when something entirely new is about to transform the daily society life, old stuff and old ways of doing things always have to give way, sooner or later.
I guess, some folks in horse industry were not entirely happy with advent of automobile back then either, since automobiles, you know, don’t need horse food and horse harnesses etc.
It’s for trucking. Why pay truckers when the truck can drive itself? But they can’t sell us the advantages for truckers and so they’ll sell it to us first.
Just because they, doesn`t mean they should!