"Low-cost Solution Viable for Self-Driving Cars to Spot Hacked GPS"

There are many challenges to overcome before self-driving personal and commercial vehicles become common. Transportation researchers at the University of Alabama (UA) have developed a promising, low-cost system to overcome one of those challenges, which is GPS hacking. Such hacking has the potential to send a self-driving vehicle to the wrong destination. A self-driving vehicle can use already installed sensors to detect traveling the wrong route when passengers are unaware of the change, preventing an attempt to spoof the Global Positioning System (GPS) signal to the vehicle. According to Dr. Mizanur Rahman, assistant professor of civil, construction, and environmental engineering and affiliate researcher with the Alabama Transportation Institute, relying on software code and in-vehicle sensors that are already part of the self-driving system would be more affordable for consumer and commercial vehicles to deny the hacked directions used to steer cargo or people away from their intended destination. He says that the sensors that guide the vehicles are the same ones that can detect a fake GPS signal. If the vehicle is misguided and has incorrect information, this can detect it and get it back on track. While commercially available vehicles have some level of automation, none have reached full autonomy. Automakers are developing cybersecurity software to protect vehicle computers from remote hacking, but GPS signal spoofing is not the same. A spoofed GPS signal arrives from outside the vehicle, leaving the internal computer system alone to navigate a new route based on false information. Instead of programming the vehicle to computationally analyze and validate the signal, the UA team developed an algorithm that uses built-in in-vehicle sensors capable of detecting acceleration, speed, and direction to validate that the car's path aligns with the intended travel directions. This article continues to discuss the UA researchers' solution for combatting GPS hacking. 

UA reports "Low-cost Solution Viable for Self-Driving Cars to Spot Hacked GPS"