Spotlight

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.

The US Navy is still investigating the causes behind the two US Navy collisions in the past two months. Many theories have been put forth, including GPS spoofing or jamming. Experts suggest that it is highly unlikely, but not impossible. 

GPS spoofing and jamming attacks are possible and have been demonstrated. GPS attacks likely caused ship navigation malfunctions in the Black Sea this summer where many ships suddenly reported that they were located inland Russia. Professor Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas successfully demonstrated such an attack in 2013 when he and his group of graduate students hijacked the navigation of a state-of-the-art yacht.

With regard to the US Navy ships, Professor Humphreys believes that the evidence is not indicative of GPS spoofing. Read the full article featuring Professor Humphreys.

An oil tanker collided with the USS John S. McCain near Singapore this week, injuring five sailors, starting a search for ten more missing sailors, and sparking concerns about potential GPS foul-play. 

“There’s something more than just human error going on,” says Jeff Stutzman, a chief intelligence officer. “Statistically, it looks very suspicious,” Dr. Humphreys chimes in. GPS spoofing has been on the rise lately, affecting ships in the Black Sea last month.

As fully autonomous ships come online and our reliance on global shipping trade increases, concerns regarding the security of onboard electronic systems are on the rise. “It would be mayhem if the right team came in [the English Channel] and decided to do a spoofing attack.”

Read the full McClatchy article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

Black Sea shipping is the latest target of GPS spoofing, according to captains of these ships in late June of this year. The GPS receivers aboard the ships began to act erratically, reporting that the ships were on land or too far out at sea.

Dr. Humphreys says the evidence indicates that this wasn’t a case of signal jamming, rather it was a deliberate attack that falsifies GPS signals to misguide ships. Dr. Humphreys demonstrated in 2013 that this attack is legitimate and viable when he and his team used it to control a state-of-the-art yacht. 

“We’ve become so dependent on GPS that we have let the other systems atrophy”, Dr. Humphreys warns. While there are ways to detect spoofing, we must not forget the other tools we have available and rely solely on GPS.

Listen to the five minute long podcast segment with Dr. Humphreys starting at 19:15.

After a recent spoofing incident perpetrated by the Kremlin, the dangers of sensor spoofing for autonomous cars feels more real than ever. Dr. Humphreys spoke with Inverse about the vulnerabilities of autonomous cars and the threat of GPS spoofing. “Everybody’s primary fear is they’re traveling down the road in an autonomous car here and somehow hacks them remotely and takes them off to some far-off place and locks the door”, said Dr. Humphreys. The Radionavigation Lab is hard at work to develop countermeasures to these problems, such as improving cryptography and developing better signal-detection detectors.

Read the full article here.