Researchers dazzle self-driving cars with laser beams

Is "security researcher" a synonym for "this is why we can't have nice things"? It might be. Jonathan Petit of security firm Security Innovation has decided that the lidar sensors used by self-driving cars need to be taken down a peg or two, and he's presenting a paper on how to exploit them using a low-powered laser.

The lidar sensors used by self-driving cars work by sending out laser beams and then measuring the light that is reflected back. Do this with several sensors arrayed around a vehicle and you can create a 360˚ view of the physical objects around the car. Petit's exploit involves shining a laser at the sensors to create a false return. "I can take echoes of a fake car and put them at any location I want," he said to IEEE Spectrum, "and I can do the same with a pedestrian or a wall."

Petit wants car makers to use more than one kind of sensor and to perform filtering to prevent this from being a problem in the future. Meanwhile, we should note that the optical sensors used by human-driven vehicles are also susceptible to security exploitation thanks to exploits like fitting a rear-facing million candlepower strobe to a car.