Need to safeguard drones and robotic cars against cyber attacks

The researchers, based at UBC's faculty of applied science, designed three types of stealth attack on robotic vehicles that caused the machines to crash, miss their targets or complete their missions much later than scheduled. The attacks required little to no human intervention to succeed on both real and simulated drones and rovers. "We saw major weaknesses in robotic vehicle software that could allow attackers to easily disrupt the behaviour of many different kinds of these machines," said Karthik Pattabiraman, the electrical and computer engineering professor who supervised the study. "Especially worrisome is the fact that none of these attacks could be detected by the most commonly used detection techniques." Robotic vehicles use special algorithms to stay on track while in motion, as well as to flag unusual behaviour that could signal an attack.