Laser can hack driverless vehicles

London: A laser pointer kit that costs less than 40 pounds can be used to hack driverless cars and render them immobile, a security researcher has claimed.

Driverless cars rely on roof-mounted laser radar, or lidar, to detect and avoid cars, pedestrians and other obstacles.

The lidar units send out laser pulses that allow the car's computer to build up a picture of the world around it.

The laser pointer kit can trick a driverless car's laser radar system into thinking that it is surrounded by obstacles, thereby immobilising it, said Jonathan Petit, principal scientist at Security Innovation, US.

"I can take echoes of a fake car and put them at any location I want," Petit, a former research fellow at the University of Cork's Computer Security Group,

told the electronics journal IEEE Spectrum. "And I can do the same with a pedestrian or a wall. If a self-driving car has poor inputs, it will make poor driving decisions," he said. Petit has used a low-power laser and a pulse generator to create false signals that tricked a commercial lidar unit into thinking it had come across several obstacles, 'The Times' reported.

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