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It would seem like the attack vector for this technology is SUPER simple to pull off. How do you trust self-driving cars that use this in a world where graffiti

It would seem like the attack vector for this technology is SUPER simple to pull off. How do you trust self-driving cars that use this in a world where graffiti exists?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
There are so many simpler attacks against human-driven cars that could be pulled off even easier today, and yet, they're not pulled off. Physical world has a much different threat model than the Internet.
Robotbeat 6y ago
But this is actually the advantage of this approach vs the alternative. Self-driving (or "autopilot") cars today try to use machine learning to read human-readable signage, but they don't have any good way to verify the values with a checksum and so are really vulnerable to graffiti (as are human drivers to some extent). It's easy to checksum a fiducial. So machine-readable signage is actually much more resistant to that kind of attack than human readable signage. Error detecting and correcting signage would be able to correct or at least detect the error, and it’s also possible to encrypt or, um, sign the signage. None of those are terribly feasible with human readable signage. A human can take a crowbar to a railroad track. A human can drop a brick from an overpass. But modifying a signed and error corrected fiducial is gonna be pretty tough.
- choward 6y ago
  What good does encryption do? All someone has to do is copy or move the sign.
  - zamfi 6y ago
    The sign could easily be tied to location, no?
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    I think your question was rhetorical, but there's an answer: Because it means that modifying the sign is not useful. (Unlike, say, modifying a speed limit sign.) Also, the fiducial can encode its orientation or position (perhaps in relation to other nearby signs... and could be a hash or checksum of its position, to save space), so the vehicle would be able to know there's a mismatch and thus mark the sign as suspect/unreliable if it was in any other spot or orientation. There are other solutions to these. But the same problem you describe occurs if someone moved a human-readable sign (but without any way to checksum). I think fiducials are not a panacea. They are just one additional data source in what needs to be a robust sensor-fusion approach. But they make a whole bunch of stuff in machine vision a LOT easier to solve. Machine-learning approaches have the same problems but with less opportunity to address them, less robustness, and more overhead.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    I supposed location and information could be added to a sign along with a certification or checksum. As long as its done in a way that doesn't require exact placement, signs found outside their location are ignored. ...something like, "Forest St. Northbound CLOSED (lat,lon) <encrypted checksum>"?
frombody 6y ago
FYI - This is literally no different than the current state of affairs. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306346-researchers-tape-speed-limit-sign-to-make-teslas-accelerate-to-85-mph https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306346-researchers-tape-...
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Yeah, in fact it'd be a LOT harder to modify a fiducial that has been checksummed/signed/encrypted. Human readable signage is potentially much easier to attack than machine-readable signage.

It would seem like the attack vector for this technology is SUPER simple to pull off. How do you trust self-driving cars that use this in a world where graffiti exists?

TeMPOraL 6y ago

There are so many simpler attacks against human-driven cars that could be pulled off even easier today, and yet, they're not pulled off. Physical world has a much different threat model than the Internet.

Robotbeat 6y ago

But this is actually the advantage of this approach vs the alternative. Self-driving (or "autopilot") cars today try to use machine learning to read human-readable signage, but they don't have any good way to verify the values with a checksum and so are really vulnerable to graffiti (as are human drivers to some extent). It's easy to checksum a fiducial. So machine-readable signage is actually much more resistant to that kind of attack than human readable signage. Error detecting and correcting signage would be able to correct or at least detect the error, and it’s also possible to encrypt or, um, sign the signage. None of those are terribly feasible with human readable signage. A human can take a crowbar to a railroad track. A human can drop a brick from an overpass. But modifying a signed and error corrected fiducial is gonna be pretty tough.

choward 6y ago
What good does encryption do? All someone has to do is copy or move the sign.
- zamfi 6y ago
  The sign could easily be tied to location, no?
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  I think your question was rhetorical, but there's an answer: Because it means that modifying the sign is not useful. (Unlike, say, modifying a speed limit sign.) Also, the fiducial can encode its orientation or position (perhaps in relation to other nearby signs... and could be a hash or checksum of its position, to save space), so the vehicle would be able to know there's a mismatch and thus mark the sign as suspect/unreliable if it was in any other spot or orientation. There are other solutions to these. But the same problem you describe occurs if someone moved a human-readable sign (but without any way to checksum). I think fiducials are not a panacea. They are just one additional data source in what needs to be a robust sensor-fusion approach. But they make a whole bunch of stuff in machine vision a LOT easier to solve. Machine-learning approaches have the same problems but with less opportunity to address them, less robustness, and more overhead.
- jayd16 6y ago
  I supposed location and information could be added to a sign along with a certification or checksum. As long as its done in a way that doesn't require exact placement, signs found outside their location are ignored. ...something like, "Forest St. Northbound CLOSED (lat,lon) <encrypted checksum>"?

frombody 6y ago

FYI - This is literally no different than the current state of affairs. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306346-researchers-tape-speed-limit-sign-to-make-teslas-accelerate-to-85-mph https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/306346-researchers-tape-...

Robotbeat 6y ago
Yeah, in fact it'd be a LOT harder to modify a fiducial that has been checksummed/signed/encrypted. Human readable signage is potentially much easier to attack than machine-readable signage.