Maybe someday a self-driving car will take you for a ride, but it might not get you where you want to go.
Can self-driving cars be hacked?
A new report from the European Cybersecurity Agency (ENISA) concludes that self-driving vehicles are vulnerable to hacking due to the advanced computers they contain. The hacks could be dangerous for passengers, pedestrians and other people on the road. Fortunately, cars are not being hijacked off the streets by hackers just yet.
“The good news is that most of the attacks we’ve seen happen in a lab or under controlled conditions,” Vyas Sekar, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering who was not involved in the study, said in an email interview. “We haven’t seen any large-scale exploits or breaches in the wild yet.”
The ENISA report finds that car manufacturers need to protect themselves against a range of attacks, including light beam sensor attacks, overwhelming object detection systems, malicious back-end activities and machine learning attacks.
