LIDAR has the same problem and the same countermeasures. Pulsed LIDAR units should have a few microseconds of random jitter in the pulse timing, too. You can still get a collision, but not multiple consistent collisions in a row, so you know it's noise.
Also, it doesn't take nearly the sophistication of the system demo'ed here -- a chaff canister released into traffic would, I imagine, play twenty kinds of havoc on any autonomous driving system that relied on radar.
People who are interested in finding out more can look up Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) jammers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio_frequency_memory
I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but the link's assertion that any of these techniques are new suggests that either allaboutcircuits is not familiar with radar/electronic attack or that Duke University and/or the automative radar folks are not up to speed with techniques used in radar/electronic attack in the defense/aerospace industries. Maybe it's the latter, as the arXiv preprint states "...show the novel ability to effectively ‘add’ (i.e., false positive attacks), ‘remove’ (i.e., false negative attacks), or ‘move’ (i.e., translation attacks) object detections...".
These are open data, too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_jamming_and_deception.
The arXiv preprint doesn't list any of the usual suspects for radar or electronic attack sources that I would expect to see in its references. There are a lot of automotive radar sources and, interestingly enough, some LiDAR and LiDAR adversarial attacks instead.
This is absolutely normal when driving on American roads at night these days.
If people want to mess up traffic they can drop a concrete block off an overpass, run a heavy chain across the road, change signage, use tire shredders or do any number of antisocial things. Many of which are extremely cheap and not preventable.
Probably the most novel factor would be that sensor disruption is more deniable than many other threats to drivers.
But how much additional cost/expense would that justify? Technically mitigating every risk isn't really possible, at some point you have to fall back to the legal system.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131074/how-to-adjus...
After I got my most recent vehicle I discovered it has a 24GHz rear-facing radar in order to alert me to a possible car in my blind spots. It misfires all the time and alerts me to guard rails and phantoms that don't exist. I don't need it, because I now keep my side mirrors set correctly I know where cars are beside me before the radar knows. I turn it off but now I'm curious if that actually deactivates the radar emitter or just stops alerting me to hits.
It's not there to replace you looking. It's there as an extra information source in case you make a mistake when looking. Maybe you're lucky with the your car, but even with curved ends of mirrors in mine, there's still a blind spot where I would not see a bike on the passenger's side and the little extra notification is great for that. It blinks for guard rails too, but that doesn't bother me - there's extremely rarely a reason to check the mirror on the side close to the rail.
> there's extremely rarely a reason to check the mirror on the side close to the rail.
...
Each time I visit US I'm frustrated by the american cars having flat mirrors. The blind spots are insane. I guess it's due to some weird regulation?
In EU mirrors have their last 2-4cm curved, and there's virtually no blind spot, and you don't need to adjust mirrors too precisely even.
Definitely not everywhere in the EU. My Yaris has flat mirrors.
When crossing under some bridges, sometimes it decelerates and warns me of a collision, even if there is no one there. I have to override it by stepping on the gas pedal until I’m through.
I’ve also felt it hiccup on a test strip where they were testing radars, I was guessing it was due to them using similar frequencies, but I’m not sure on that one.
Amazing. We've gone full circle now. I wonder if this is a problem of generational differences in knowledge transfer ... or rather the lack of it.
You can notice this in a lot of hardware products with "noob" mistakes that the prior product generation did not have etc. Software is probably the same but the product is too opaque to see into so ot just feels crappy.
how long until smart 12 year olds can remotely hijack major car brands on a freeway with a laptop and a small python script?
[0]: https://jalopnik.com/chryslers-uconnect-vulnerable-to-remote...
Steering? Rails.
Anti-collision? Signals.
Fuel/Charging? Overhead power lines.
