Hacked Highways? Connected Cars Could Gridlock Entire Cities, Study Warns
Hacked
Highways? Connected Cars Could Gridlock Entire Cities, Study Warns
ATLANTA — Cybersecurity
has quickly become a priority for large corporations, businesses, and
individuals alike in recent years. It seems like another major data breach is
being reported every other week, and personal online accounts are often
compromised by malicious actors. Now, a new study out of the Georgia
Institute of Technology has found that hackers may soon be able to cause major traffic problems in the real world by hacking
and stranding internet-connected cars.
The study’s authors theorize that hackers would only have to
shut down a portion of cars on the road in a busy city like Manhattan during
rush hour to completely shut down traffic and gridlock the city. Researchers
hope that their findings will spark a more detailed analysis of automotive cybersecurity, especially moving forward as cars
become more and more high tech.
“Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars
have physical consequences,” says co-author Peter Yunker in a release.
Yunker and his team say that right now the automotive
cybersecurity sector is focusing too much on hacks that target one car, and
they need to consider the possibility that a higher number of cars being hacked at the same time could lead to
mayhem.
“With cars, one of the worrying things is that currently there
is effectively one central computing system, and a lot runs through it. You
don’t necessarily have separate systems to run your car and run your satellite
radio. If you can get into one, you may be able to get into the other,”
explains co-author Jesse Silverberg
The research team ran simulations on Manhattan, and found they
were able to bring all traffic to a complete freeze by randomly stalling 20% of
the cars on the road at rush hour. Hacking just 10% of cars on the road would stop
traffic enough to prevent emergency vehicles from moving around.
“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,” says graduate research assistant David Yanni.
Researchers say that Manhattan is actually a less than ideal
target for car hackers, and more damage may be done with less cars in other
cities.
“Manhattan has a nice grid, and that makes traffic more
efficient. 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 explains.
Furthermore, the study’s authors say they did not account for any outside
factors, such as traffic spillover from other blocked streets or public panic,
when compiling their findings. With this in mind, they say that its likely that
significantly less than 20% of all cars would be needed to gridlock a city and
cause a panic.
The study is published in the journal Physical Review E.
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