[GlenTheMachine]

Spoofing radar signals isn't exactly new, and the ability to do it on the ground (so to speak) shouldn't be surprising. The military has been doing it for decades.

Also, it doesn't take nearly the sophistication of the system demo'ed here -- a chaff canister released into traffic would, I imagine, play twenty kinds of havoc on any autonomous driving system that relied on radar.

[derstander]

> Spoofing radar signals isn't exactly new, and the ability to do it on the ground (so to speak) shouldn't be surprising. The military has been doing it for decades.

People who are interested in finding out more can look up Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) jammers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio_frequency_memory

I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but the link's assertion that any of these techniques are new suggests that either allaboutcircuits is not familiar with radar/electronic attack or that Duke University and/or the automative radar folks are not up to speed with techniques used in radar/electronic attack in the defense/aerospace industries. Maybe it's the latter, as the arXiv preprint states "...show the novel ability to effectively ‘add’ (i.e., false positive attacks), ‘remove’ (i.e., false negative attacks), or ‘move’ (i.e., translation attacks) object detections...".

These are open data, too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_jamming_and_deception.

The arXiv preprint doesn't list any of the usual suspects for radar or electronic attack sources that I would expect to see in its references. There are a lot of automotive radar sources and, interestingly enough, some LiDAR and LiDAR adversarial attacks instead.

[euroderf]

What are the frequencies here ? Can it all be done with SDR ?

[derstander]

As the sibling comment from zeeed mentioned, yes — in this case.

More generally maybe but not always. If you wanted to use a DRFM jammer to insert false targets in an imaging radar, the bandwidths required may be a challenge.

There are commercial SAR satellite operators that you (for some definition of you — I personally couldn’t afford it) can buy from that sell imagery that’s got a resolution of 0.5 meters per pixel. That would require a bandwidth of about 300MHz. I haven’t looked at the SDR landscape in awhile but when I did that was sort of sporty — by that I mean >300 complex megasamples a second (for Nyquist, not including any oversampling).

And that would be after basebanding in analog before sampling to digital.

[zeeed]

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.16024.pdf

Yes, their POC uses SDR

[nine_k]

A large cloud of glitter would do the same for optical systems, e.g. human drivers. Shining intense light at drivers is also known to cause havoc and incidents. Now imagine a night road lit by a dancing hall light show; many human drivers would find themselves discombobulated.

[shiroiuma]

>Shining intense light at drivers is also known to cause havoc and incidents.

This is absolutely normal when driving on American roads at night these days.

[actionfromafar]

Also, blue-tinted, blinding LED headlights everywhere, maybe that's what you meant. The laser lights maybe aren't blue-tinted but blinding nevertheless.

[dghughes]

I'm in Canada and any discussion I have everyone agrees how every damn car now has blindingly bright headlights. It's not the bluish ones it's pure white lights they're incredibly bright. Someone dropped the ball on the regulations for modern headlights.

My cousin got a new truck and he said everyone now flashes their lights at him but his lights are on low. His previous truck was fine but this new model is terrible. It's not just trucks it's cars too.

I'm ready to go to my member of parliament to ask WTF?

[jacquesm]

That's because the headlights got ever smaller, they are now point sources that output as much power (or more) than previous generations but from a much smaller spot. The fact that it is all direct light now rather than indirect via mirrors also doesn't help, that means you're looking straight at the lightsource instead of at a reflection across a much wider area.

There is some talk about regulating minimum projected area for a given amount of power to reduce this effect somewhat.

[BizarroLand]

I think what would help would be some way to turn down the brightness of the headlights that could be calibrated at the shop when you get tires rotated.

Set some rules for how bright lights are allowed to be.

[zikduruqe]

As a cyclist, I hate peeking over my left shoulder and seeing two red lights at a distance behind me, then all the sudden some Jeep (or r/Heep) blasts by me.

Oh, that Jeep was running red lights on the front. I thought that vehicle was heading away from me.

[kwhitefoot]

Red lights on the front? Is that a common thing, I've never heard of it. Surely it's illegal?

[zikduruqe]

Red, green, blue, etc...

Every state has laws that when a vehicle is in forward motion on a road, that the only permissible colored lights are white and amber. Yes illegal.

[shiroiuma]

Yep, that's exactly what I meant: all the ridiculously bright headlights that are always on the high-beam setting, plus also the huge off-road light bars that pickup trucks commonly have and use on the highways.

[lend000]

Even ignoring the possibility of intentional jamming, I wonder if the increase in radar-equipped cars will start causing significant interference in other cars' operations. Every once in a while I get a phantom "brake!" signal when there is nothing in front of me.

[daft_pink]

Just about every Toyota sold in the past few years has a radar unit on its bumper. Pretty sure if there was going to be interference naturally from a lot of vehicles, we would have seen it already.

[imp0cat]

I'm sure they tests their vehicles to prevent the scenario where their own cars interfere with each other.

[dosman33]

I think what's important here is not this first low-level stab at manipulating car radar systems. It makes a beach head on what adversaries can possibly do and demonstrates that manufacturers need to try harder.

[xyzzy123]

I wonder how much effort is warranted though.

If people want to mess up traffic they can drop a concrete block off an overpass, run a heavy chain across the road, change signage, use tire shredders or do any number of antisocial things. Many of which are extremely cheap and not preventable.

Probably the most novel factor would be that sensor disruption is more deniable than many other threats to drivers.

But how much additional cost/expense would that justify? Technically mitigating every risk isn't really possible, at some point you have to fall back to the legal system.

[littlestymaar]

> Probably the most novel factor would be that sensor disruption is more deniable than many other threats to drivers.

There's another aspect to it: sure you could disrupt traffic with all the means you cited, but you had to be there physically, and you'd run the very likely risk of being caught and beaten up by angry drivers.

With invisible and electronic means like this, all it takes is to put a box with the jamming kit and a small battery near the road and you can trigger it when you're far, and you could even trigger it in many big roads at the same time and see the chaos you caused.

Why would you do that? For the same reason a few people send false bomb alerts for the police to evacuate places, and others SWAT streamers. Out of pure naughtiness.

[GlenTheMachine]

Actually you don't. A well known attack against trucking is to suspend a cinder block from an overpass, just high enough for the cars to miss it but not the trucks. People put them up in the middle of the night and are miles away before an incident.

Dropping caltrops on a secondary road at night would also work. Rigging a drone to drop chaff on a freeway, etc, would also get the perpetrator physically away from the action. Really, with some creativity, surprisingly crude attacks can shut down a road with minimal exposure of the perp.

A decade ago, the Beltway Sniper terrorized my neighborhood for two weeks. It turned out to be a teenage boy and a certifiably insane adult with some military training. A similar attack by someone who actually knew what they were doing and who wasn't addled would have been very, very difficult to catch. Much less if the attack were, say, from wooded roadsides that overlooked interstates.

[gruez]

>There's another aspect to it: sure you could disrupt traffic with all the means you cited, but you had to be there physically, and you'd run the very likely risk of being caught and beaten up by angry drivers

Dropping a handful of nails over an overpass is unlikely to be noticed, much less attract retaliation from the victims