Spotlight

A preliminary NTSB report involving the fatal Tesla crash in March has just be released. The report describes the accident:

 A Tesla Model X operating in Autopilot mode was originally following a car in front of it. Seven seconds before the crash, the system began steering left and accelerated into a highway barrier. The driver’s hands were not on the wheel for the six seconds preceding the crash.

“What strikes me from the NTSB preliminary report is that the car was silent—no visual or auditory alert at all—as it drove straight into the concrete median barrier,” says Dr. Humphreys “Yet the car’s forward radar must surely have sensed the highly reflective crash attenuator mounted on the barrier.” The preliminary report does not address the cause of the accident. A final conclusion is due in the coming months. 

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

The Uber self-driving vehicle involved in fatal accident earlier this year wasn’t set to stop in an emergency, states a preliminary NTSB report. The Uber vehicle, a Volvo sport-utility car, is equipped with automatic emergency braking, however the system was disabled by Uber to “reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior.”

According to the NTSB, the Volvo system decided 1.3 seconds before the impact that emergency braking was needed. “Over those critical 1.3 seconds, the car could have slowed down from 43 to 24 mph before the collision,” says Dr. Humphreys. “That would have given the pedestrian a better chance of surviving the collision.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

Since its inception, global reliance on GPS has increased tremendously. The Department of Defense has recognized this dependence as a single point-of-failure and is seeking to augment GPS with other systems to mitigate the effect of GPS jamming and spoofing. The goal is not to replace GPS, only to augment it with other redundant systems.

One potential solution are pseudo-satellites: “transmitters deployed in terrestrial constellations and, potentially, in aerial vehicles.” Other systems might target situational awareness: identifying when GPS has been compromised and informing commanding officers when it occurs.

“Situational awareness is critical in the cyberwarfare realm… Spoofing attacks that succeed keep targets in the dark long enough to accomplish their objectives, says Todd Humphreys… Conversely, targets want to detect an attack as soon as possible so they can take corrective action.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

 The Russian military has been jamming US military drones in Syria for the past several weeks following a series of suspected chemical weapons attacks on civilians in eastern Ghouta. The Russian military was concerned about retaliation and began jamming the GPS systems of drones, impacting US operations.

“Jamming, which means blocking or scrambling a drone’s reception…can be uncomplicated”, says Dr. Humphreys. “GPS receivers in most drones can be fairly easily jammed.“ 

Russia was caught jamming drones in Ukraine after the invasion of Crimea. The jammers has a significant impact on the United Nations surveillance fleet, grounding it for days.

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

Since GPS’ inception in the 1970s, global reliance on the timing and positioning system has steadily increased. Today, GPS is used to do everything navigation to time-stamping financial transactions to dropping bombs. While GPS has certainly changed modern society for the better, researchers have become concerned with the global dependency on the service. What happens if it’s suddenly not available?   

GPS is vulnerable to attacks like jamming and spoofing. Five years ago, Todd Humphreys and a group of researchers boarded an $80-million yacht and spoofed GPS signals to lead it off course. “During that experiment, none of the equipment on the yacht’s bridge ever set off an alarm,” said Todd Humphreys. “The spoofing was so subtle that the automated systems could not detect that anything was wrong.”

Now researchers are scrambling to find a way to harden GPS against attacks. Many researchers are looking at integrating signals from different sources such as radio, TV, and cell signals. “For robustness, you really need multiple sources.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

A self-driving Uber vehicle ran into and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, AZ on Sunday, March 18th. The video collected by the Tempe police show the moments leading up to the collision. The vehicle was traveling around 40 mph at around 10 pm at night when the vehicle struck a woman walking her bike across the road. The self-driving vehicle made no attempt to brake or swerve before the impact. The human operator was looking down for approximately five seconds before the crash.

Uber’s vehicles are equipped with laser sensors, radar, and cameras used to detect its surroundings. “The video is damning for Uber”, said Todd Humphreys. “This appears to have been a serious failure of the Uber perception system … This accident calls into question Uber’s ability to correctly and promptly interpret its data.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

Next generation GPS chips will permit global localization to within 30 cm, a big step forward for self-driving vehicles among other applications. Broadcom has announced that their next generation GPS chips will use less battery, work in urban canyons, and will have an accuracy of 30 cm. Current GPS units have an accuracy of 3-5 meters, sufficient to determine which turn to take to navigate around a city, but not accurate enough for self-driving vehicles. 

“Todd E. Humphreys, associate professor of engineering at the University of Texas, said that one of the key advantages of autonomous vehicles is the ability to send them down the road in tight formations called “platoons.” Cars would be separated by just a few yards, reducing wind resistance by drafting like NASCAR drivers do, slashing fuel consumption and dramatically increasing the number of cars that could fit on a highway. But platooning will work only if each car knows its exact location, down to the foot.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

GPS underpins many modern systems, from time stamping financial transactions to map creation and navigation, but the system is vulnerable. In Summer 2017, dozens of ships in the Black Sea suddenly reported that their GPS units were malfunctioning and displaying the ships as inland. Experts indicate that this was a GPS spoofing attack performed by Russia. “Do I think this is a sign that the spoofing is government backed or state sponsored?” said Todd Humphreys, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “I would have to say the evidence points to ‘yes.’ “

Until recently, GPS spoofing hasn’t been considered a threat. Recent events however, are changing minds. “We are dangerously vulnerable to spoofing,” Humphreys says. In 2012, Humphreys successfully spoofed a GPS unit on a yacht, taking over the navigation system and misguiding it. “We found that we didn’t raise any alarms on the bridge,” he said of the experiment. “The spoofing was clandestine.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

GPS isn’t perfect; it it often off on the order of 1-10 meters, but it is almost never off by 25 miles. According to Gurvan Le Meur, the captain of a tanker traveling on the Black Sea in June this year, his GPS reported that the ship was located 25-30 miles from where it actually way. Furthermore–and perhaps most startling–the GPS was absolutely sure that it was at this new location. 

After restarting the equipment, the GPS was still incorrectly reporting the ship’s position. It seemed not to be a device fault, rather a directed spoofing attack. The evidence indicates that the attack came from Russia, as the ships reported their locations around the Russian Gelendzhik airport.

This isn’t the first time that spoofing has been detected in correspondence with Russia. GPS spoofing has reportedly occurred around the Kremlin, affecting cell phones and GPS-based navigation. This was particularly impactful on Yandex Taxi, a taxi service in Russia that relies on GPS to navigate around Moscow.

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

Throughout several days in the end of June, over 20 ships reported problems with GPS reception in the Black Sea. According to experts, the problems were probably a result of an attack on the GPS infrastructure.

Logs from ships affected by the GPS spoofing have been recovered and the evidence appears conclusive that it was specifically a spoofing attack. One can clearly see the ships’ GPS position being manipulated as the ships jump around the sea and a nearby Russian airport.

“The evidence points strongly to a spoofing attack. The captain’s account and the pictures he sent are quite convincing. And according to my sources it’s still ongoing, but at a lower signal strength”, reports Dr. Humpreys. 

Read the full article featuring Dr Humphreys.