Localization and Navigation in Autonomous Driving: Threats and Countermeasures

With the growing number of research studies on autonomous driving, a lot of new technologies for self-driving cars are also constantly emerging. While significantly promoting the development of autonomous vehicles, these emerging technologies also have potential vulnerabilities, which may bring up some nonnegligible security threats. Loopholes existing in localization and navigation technologies, which are the key elements of route planning and navigation, could be utilized by adversaries to manipulate autonomous driving navigation by hijacking valuable vehicles, goods, or even target characters. Toward this end, we provide in this article a basic guide summarizing the security threats and attack schemes, and we propose countermeasures specifically for localization and navigation technologies in autonomous vehicles. After that, we present a novel route spoofing attack that could also be implemented against future autonomous driving navigation. With such implementation, we demonstrate that effectively, routes of targeted drivers can be usurped and hence mislead drivers to take a wrong route, go by a malicious place, and even be tracked in real time.