Hackers can paralyses a driverless vehicle by exploiting its laser navigation systems and sensors to trick it into thinking it will collide with another auto, person or obstacle, according to security research. Petit says that he can take echoes of any fake auto and set them up any location of his choice to make the driverless car’s on-board systems think that something is dangerously closer to it.

The self-driving cars can be brought to a stop, tricked into taking evasive action or into turning in a certain direction by placing the spoofed objects in their paths.

Google, Lexus, Mercedes, Audi and other auto manufacturers all user lidar on their prototype driverless cars.

Jonathan Petit, principal scientist at software security company Security Innovation, has unearthed gaping security vulnerability in Lidar sensors – essentially the eyes of any self-driving vehicle.

Lidar laser ranging technology costs thousands of pounds, but Petit demonstrated that cars could be hacked cheaply with readily available products. And I can do the same with a pedestrian or a wall. You can use an off-the-shelf mini-computer like Arduino or Raspberry Pi instead of a pulse generator when you do the attack. Petit recorded pulses from a commercial IBEO Lux; the lidar device, which is advertised to be used in “in urban traffic and on the motorway”, has sensors that “work accurately and reliably even at high speeds, in poor weather conditions and heavy traffic”. These cars use the lidar system, which is created to measure distances by illuminating the objects around using laser and then analyzing the reflection.

“I can spoof thousands of objects and basically carry out a denial-of-service attack on the tracking system so it’s not able to track real objects”. “It’s really off the shelf”, he said.

Mr. Petit has previously presented his paper “Revisiting Attacker Model for Smart Vehicles” at the IEEE 6th worldwide Symposium on Wireless Vehicular Communications (WiVeC) that was held in Vancouver, Canada in September 2014. Medium-level risks to self-driving cars included “electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that could shut down the electronics altogether or environmental confusion inflicted on radar and lidar scanners”.