“Randomly stalling 20 percent of cars during rush hour would mean total traffic freeze. In simulations of hacking internet-connected cars, the researchers froze traffic in Manhattan nearly solid, and it would not even take that to wreak havoc. If you can get into one, you may be able to get into the other,” says Jesse Silverberg of Multiscale Systems, Inc. You don’t necessarily have separate systems to run your car and run your satellite radio. “With cars, one of the worrying things is that currently there is effectively one central computing system, and a lot runs through it. It may not be that hard for state, terroristic, or mischievous actors to commandeer parts of the Internet of Things, including cars.
“Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars have physical consequences,” says Peter Yunker, an assistant professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The simulations are conservative as they do not factor in spillover traffic from blocked roads, delivery trucks, and normal traffic obstructions. Streets completely faded out are gridlocked to a standstill, and very faint streets are no longer practically usable. The fainter the street, the slower the traffic. Maps of Manhattan show the effect of hacking and stranding 20 percent of vehicles on the streets at varying times of day. They warn that even with increasingly tighter cyber defenses, the amount of data breached has soared in the past four years, but hackable objects can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace. Researchers want to expand the current discussion on automotive cybersecurity, which mainly focuses on hacks that could crash one car or run over one pedestrian, to include potential mass mayhem. You climb out to see gridlock down every street in view, then a news alert on your watch tells you that hackers have paralyzed all Manhattan traffic by randomly stranding internet-connected cars. Imagine it’s the year 2026, at rush hour, and your self-driving car abruptly shuts down right where it blocks traffic. University Georgia Institute of TechnologyĪ new simulation shows what it would take for future hackers to wreak widespread havoc by randomly stranding self-driving cars in a major city, researchers report.
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