![]() "If you could also make sure that cars next to each other can't be hacked at the same time that would decrease the risk of them blocking off traffic together." "Split up the digital network influencing the cars to make it impossible to access too many cars through one network," said lead author Skanka Vivek, a postdoctoral researcher in Yunker's lab. The researchers do have some general ideas of how to reduce the potential damage. They simply want to give security experts a calculable idea of the scale of a hack that would shut a city down. They also stress that they are not cybersecurity experts, nor are they saying anything about the likelihood of someone carrying out such a hack. Nor did they consider hacks that would target cars at locations that maximize trouble. ![]() The researchers also did not factor in ensuing public panic nor car occupants becoming pedestrians that would further block streets or cause accidents. If we were to factor in these other things, the number of cars you'd have to stall would likely drop down significantly," Yunker said. In many cases, blocked roads spill over traffic into other roads, which we also did not include. "I want to emphasize that we only considered static situations - if roads are blocked or not blocked. The researchers left out factors that would likely worsen hacking damage, thus a real-world hack may require stalling even fewer cars to shut down Manhattan. Looking at cities without large grids like Atlanta, Boston, or Los Angeles, and we think hackers could do worse harm because a grid makes you more robust with redundancies to get to the same places down many different routes," Yunker said. "Manhattan has a nice grid, and that makes traffic more efficient. The researchers' results appear in the journal Physical Review E on July 20, 2019.įor the city to be safe, hacking damage would have to be below that. The same thing would happen with a 20 percent hack during intermediate daytime traffic. Hacking 10 percent of all cars at rush hour would debilitate traffic enough to prevent emergency vehicles from expediently cutting through traffic that is inching along citywide. For example, if 40 percent of all cars on the road were connected, hacking half would suffice. Not all cars on the road would have to be connected, just enough for hackers to stall 20 percent of all cars on the road. ![]() At 20 percent, the city has been broken up into small islands, where you may be able to inch around a few blocks, but no one would be able to move across town," said David Yanni, a graduate research assistant in Junker's lab. "Randomly stalling 20 percent of cars during rush hour would mean total traffic freeze. Here are their results, and the numbers are conservative for reasons mentioned below. 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," said Jesse Silverberg of Multiscale Systems, Inc., who co-led the study with Yunker. 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," said Peter Yunker, who co-led the study and is an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics. They warn that even with increasingly tighter cyber defenses, the amount of data breached has soared in the past four years, but objects becoming hackable can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace. The 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. have applied physics in a new study to simulate what it would take for future hackers to wreak exactly this widespread havoc by randomly stranding these cars. Flashback to July 2019, the dawn of autonomous vehicles and other connected cars, and physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc.
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