An autonomous systems defense company contends it has successfully spoofed the GPS mechanism of a Tesla Model 3 using the automaker’s latest Autopilot technology, sending the vehicle off its intended route.
Regulus Cyber said it used commercially available hardware and software to wirelessly divert the electric car using Navigate on Autopilot, a Tesla feature that—with driver supervision—guides a car along the highway, from on-ramp to off-ramp, executing lane changes and navigating interchanges along the way.
According to Haifa, Israel-based Regulus, the car was 3 miles from a planned exit, traveling at a steady speed and in the middle of the lane with the Navigate feature activated when its test began. The car reacted as if the exit was 500 feet away, according to Regulus, slowing “abruptly,” flicking on the turn signal and turning off the road.
Now, to get this to work, the company said it had to install a 10-centimeter-long antenna on the roof of the target car. And Tesla, responding to questions about the software maker’s test, dismissed it as a sales ploy.
“These marketing claims are simply a for-profit company’s attempt to use Tesla’s name to mislead the public into thinking there is a problem that would require the purchase of this company’s product,” a Tesla spokesperson said. “That is simply not the case. Safety is our top priority, and we do not have any safety concerns related to these claims.”
But the issue of GPS spoofing has hovered over autonomous driving from its inception. Relying on a wonky signal to get to your destination in a normal car may simply mean missing your exit. Relying on it to keep your car on the right path at 60 mph is something else entirely. Now that the general public has awakened to the fact that autonomous driving is getting closer to reality, addressing consumer safety concerns will be critical to facilitating mass adoption.
In a 2018 paper winkingly titled “All Your GPS Are Belong to Us: Towards Stealthy Manipulation of Road Navigation Systems,” researchers demonstrated the possibility that spoofing—substituting pirate signals for those of a GPS satellite—could stealthily send you to the wrong destination.
While they note the threat of GPS spoofing has been discussed as far back as 2001, and that spoofing has been shown to work in other contexts, their experiment was the first to test road navigation systems. The researchers used real drivers behind the wheel of a car that was being told to go to the wrong place.
Some 38 out of 40 participants followed the illicit signals, the researchers said.
“The problem is critical, considering that navigation systems are actively used by billions of drivers on the road and play a key role in autonomous vehicles,” wrote the authors, who hail from Virginia Tech, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research.