GhostStripe attack haunts self-driving cars by making them ignore road signs Six boffins mostly hailing from Singapore-based universities say they can prove it's possible to interfere with autonomous vehicles by exploiting the machines' reliance on camera-based computer vision and cause them to not recognize road signs. The technique, dubbed GhostStripe [PDF] in a paper to be presented at the ACM …
I wonder if they could have hired everyone a MK1 Chauffeur with what they have invested in all of this self driving stuff or paid every Uber driver a living wage. I suspect that In the end separate raised highways will be built long after we're dead.
True, but the poster is referring to notices on the back of large vehicles indicating to the drivers behind what that vehicles limits are, either mandated limits on some types of roads where it's different to the posted limits or to indicate that it has a speed limiter. These properly printer and legal notices pre-date computer vision assisted driving aids by some years. It's up to the people designing computer vision assisted driving systems to cope with the legal things it may "see" out on a real road.
No human would mistake those notices for real road signs.
Unless you want them to be.
Of course, to bother a human driver, just shining laser pen in their eyes will do it.
A different unintended effect - a short time ago at the train station, I tried to take a picture of an electronic sign board, to refer to later. I couldn't. Most of the pixels were not live in any phone photo that I took.
I presume the point is obfuscation that will not be noticed by the human eye. That way only SD cars are targeted. Or a particular SD car can be target by switching on the laser at the right time. Even if the occupant is watching the road, they will not see the obfuscation and not be ready to grab the steering wheel.
Nice but really overcomplicated and non practical. There are a lot of other simpler attacks, but it you are a hitman from some TLA maybe it's a really new way to make someone have an accident without anyone noticing, if you can drop your projecting machine and remove it without being seen or recorded by any person or surveillance camera along the road.
Wouldn't be too hard - a small drone would do the trick. Land it near the sign, turn on the LED when the target approaches, fly the drone off after. An LED would not need a large drone, nor would it need a large battery pack since it would only be run for the fly in, a few seconds of light, then the fly out. Likely nobody's going to notice it. If it's small enough, and painted correctly, your average camera's not going to spot it either as traffic cams are focused on the intersection and looking for tag numbers. It's not looking behind itself, and isn't going to be able to focus on something beyond the intersection.
Curiously enough, road layout and signs are designed to be readily understood by people. Peoples' perceptions are imperfect, especially at higher speeds, which is why we get people crashing on seemingly innocuous curves on wide divided highways (.....dual carriageways). Road layout and signage is designed to reduce ambiguity and so enhance safety. It should be easy for people to design and place road signs and markings that actually cause people to crash but this sort of thing is likely to be illegal. (Anyway, even official signage is sometimes not good enough, hence the popularity of the "low bridge cams" where you can watch people ripping off the top of box trucks in real time because they just won't obey the signs.)
I am so surprised that you can fool machine vision. Who'd have thought it?
Quite hard to fool the eyes, a little bit simpler to confuse the brain.
A town near me, I think the mayor must have been paid by the sign. There's the speed restriction sign (completely unnecessary as passing the town boundary sign requires the speed to reduce to 50), there's a "cars on the right have priority", there's a "no overtaking", there's a "we have a rest stop"..."with functioning toilet" (no, no it doesn't), and finally to top it all off a further three panels that I think are telling me when market day is and that it is only between 9am and 12pm. And you know the absolute shittiest thing? The signs are on a big grid, like three rows of two or something, the ones that are important (arguably don't overtake and people will pull right out in front of you) are mingled in with the rest. So utterly dumb.
While I'm having a road rant, another nearby town has made an art installation of metalwork that looks like people, placed in various locations along the road - including one right by where the school bus stops.
So us drivers are being conditioned to ignore humanoid shapes alongside the road in certain places. Certain places around a school for younger children.
Clever. Very very clever...
This has been going on for years and is getting worse. ''Caution fatigue'' similar to the over abundance of warning signs on construction sites, which I have taken up with the APS and the HSE to no avail.
Add this to the total clusterfuck of 20mph limits in most villages and towns in Wales and people inadvertently break some law or other because rather than have their eyes on the road they are scanning all the unneccessary signs, their speedo, the fucking moron six inches from their back bumper.
Having three stes of warning signs that you are approaching a speed limit is fucking nonsense. You need a speed limit sign, that is it, if you can't cope without the big huge fluorescent sign each side of the road every 100 metres for 300 metres then you should be off the fucking road.
Sure it is.
How many times have you been driving and you think you see something ahead but it turns out to be something else. Maybe you think you see a man standing on the side of the road, but it is just the way the shadows are playing on the trees in the background. As you approach you reach a point where that illusion is broken, but sometimes the illusions are close enough that you might cover your brake thinking you may need to stop.
If we could see in IR we'd know it wasn't a man because the heat signature would be all wrong, if we had laser/sonar distance ranging we could see there is no object in that location, etc.
I had a heart-stopping moment a while ago. I live in a rural area, and one little-traveled road is in a heavily forested area, so even on a sunny day there are patches of deep shadow. I crested a small hill and almost didn't see the boy (mid-teens, I would guess) bicycling in the middle of the road. He was wearing dark clothing and basically blended in with the asphalt road surface. I slammed on the brakes, and in passing mentioned that the patchy shadows made it difficult to see him, even in daytime, and he might consider wearing a white or bright color shirt to improve visibility. The remark was received politely with the deadpan look every teenager has when hearing an adult. Had I hit him, the clear sunny day would have made it hard for the defense on "I didn't see him".
When I switched to a car with daytime running lights I noticed they were just bright enough to reflect off bike reflectors in shadowed areas like that. Of course the reflector has to be pointed in the right direction - if they get bumped they might not do the job and I'd guess a teenager who thinks he'll live forever (like all of us did back then) isn't going to notice or care if his rear reflector is pointed down or missing entirely.
UK "Highway Code" does tell bicyclists to dress for visibility - pedestrians too, I think. I forget which rule or rules, it's there somewhere. This isn't the law except for the parts which are, but it is government-dictated best practice. I slightly grudged having ugly fluorescent west be quasi compulsory on two wheels, but - it's prudent.
Doesn't this require the attacker to be able and willing to physically go somewhere and tamper with road signs, semaphores and whatnot? Installing complex electronics, even?
Doable, yes, but if this is the scenario we're talking about, well... such an attacker could just about as easily fool human eyeballs too. It's not that difficult to screw up a semaphore to make you drive straight through a busy intersection. Hiding a stop sign would be even easier.
I think this applies: https://xkcd.com/1958/
Similar was said about keyless ignition and remote unlocking devices. Within a a very short time, there was cheap commodity devices available from "sources" that required no intelligence to operate. If there's a market for something, someone will come up with a cheap way to produce the goods. I don't see this specific device becoming all that popular but could easily see something the size of a small torch/flashlight being able to produce the effect that could be operated almost unnoticed by anyone.
I've worked out a way to introduce a type of flicker into any computer monitor that can cause nausea, blindness, madness or psychotic rage. I'm also working on a HDD vulnerability that could exponentially increase the speed to the point where the disks shatter free and slice pieces from the user's limbs.
Developing resilient code, distributed systems and security by design is too 20thC. Grants for hacking things, crashing things and blowing things up are the future of academic computing.
"I'm also working on a HDD vulnerability that could exponentially increase the speed to the point where the disks shatter free and slice pieces from the user's limbs."
I think last one has been done already with CD/DVD drive reaching 52x or more and a slight flaw in the disc. Works best on tray-less/slot type drives :-)
Shouldn't the fact that the stop sign is the only one which is octagonal be a clue for the software?
and Give Way (Yield) signs are inverted equilateral triangles (delta).
I remember that being able to identify a stop sign from behind was necessary for the licence test because of a peculiarity in the local road code at the time (50 years ago) where a stop sign only required a vehicle to stop but could proceed according to the give way rules. So a vehicle from a stop sign proceeding straight or turning left had right of way over oncoming vehicles and those on the left. That insanity has long ago perished along with a few unfortunate interstate drivers I suspect.
The problem with AI/LLM is that you often don't know what features it uses from its training set to identify a feature. There was a (apocryphal ?) story in the 1980s of an earlier Cold War ML experiment to identify Soviet tanks which appeared to be quite accurate until the boffins discovered the feature the neural network was actually using was some contigent feature like the camouflage pattern.
Somewhere* (not France) the stop signs don't have "STOP" written on them but have "ARRET" which might throw a model that used the words.
*Dr Giggle tells me its Quebec - figures. :)
"*Dr Giggle tells me its Quebec - figures. :)"
Not really all that surprising since the official language is French* and a significant percentage of the population identify as not being fluent in English.
It appears that English speakers, as 2nd language or even first is on the increase, especially among the younger generations and recent legislation "protecting" French indicates that there is concern over that.
* The French may disagree that what the Quebecois speak is French :-)
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