Does Tesla now have to contend with Wile E. Coyote?
Linda Baker, of FreightWaves, contacted me by email to ask me about the hacks carried out by Keen Security Lab, a security laboratory belonging to China’s tech giant Tencent, on Tesla vehicle driving assistance systems, which included tricking the windscreen wiper control system and lane change control. On April 3, FreightWaves published an article titled “Researchers trick Tesla Autopilot using stickers on the road” (pdf), quoting me.
The hacks in question, which included showing a series of images to the front camera of the Tesla which the windshield wiper mechanism identified as rain or, more dangerously, placing three small white stickers on a road, which ticked the vehicle into changing lanes, may lead Tesla to consider how to protect its vehicles against such eventualities, but as such, they do not bring into question the safety of the company’s vehicles, nor should they qualify for the company’s bug bounty program, which is the reason why they have become news.
No system can be protected against every eventuality and limits have to be set. As I commented to Linda, putting stickers on a road to mislead a vehicle’s sensors is more like setting a booby trap or…
