This could be controlled remotely, with the spoofing equipment installed under the car, the academics claimed in a paper due to be presented at the 2018 USENIX Security Symposium taking place in Baltimore this August. The second attack did trigger a recalculating prompt, but was taken in the opposite direction to where they’d asked to go.Īll this was achieved with a portable spoofer of various equipment-a HackRF One software defined radio, a Raspberry Pi, a portable power source and an antenna-that cost a total of $220 and could easily fit into a backpack.

This meant the driver wouldn’t be alerted with the “recalculating” voice prompt, even though they were taken 2.1 kilometers away from the original destination. In their first of two attacks in the real world, a ghost destination was set to another location on the original route.

“On average, our algorithm identified 1547 potential attacking routes for each target trip for the attacker to choose from,” the researchers claimed in their paper. They were acquired from from the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) and the Boston taxi trace dataset used by MIT Challenge. The algorithm searches for matching maps by using a dataset of 600 taxi trips taken across Manhattan and Boston. So for a truly stealthy attack, a replica map is required. For instance, a driver might see a straight road where the spoofed GPS shows a crossroads. But any sensible driver would be able to determine something was wrong if the map suddenly looked very different. The hacker can then start sending false GPS data.

In a typical GPS spoofing attack, the hacker forces the software to connect to their own equipment rather than the legitimate satellite systems. Why bother with the ghost map? To keep the driver truly unaware they’re going the wrong way. It’s then possible to switch in a “ghost location” to replace the legitimate place the driver wants to get to without them noticing, according to the researchers’ paper. Their hacks used an algorithm that searched for map layouts that look similar but aren ’t the same as the real ones.

The researchers-from Virginia Tech, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Microsoft Research-tested out their attacks at midnight in Chengdu, China, riding around in a Ford Escape, guided by Google’s navigation software running on two different phones, a Xiaomi with Android 8.0 and a Huawei on Android 6.0.

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