Hackers could one day gridlock Manhattan by infiltrating smart cars making up 10 per cent of all vehicles being driven in the New York City borough.
Although car hacking is rare, it can be done, giving attackers complete remote control of the vehicle. 鈥淲e wanted to get a sense of the worst-case scenario,鈥� says Skanda Vivek at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
He and his colleagues modelled聽what would happen if cars all over聽Manhattan suddenly came to a stop. Their simulation halted vehicles at random on straight roads with between two and six lanes. They found that in 85 per cent of their simulations, traffic came to a complete standstill. The periods where it didn鈥檛 were those with lower traffic levels, although the speed of that traffic still slowed significantly.
Advertisement
Hackers would need to stop 13 cars per kilometre per lane to shut down the entire city 鈥� equivalent to 10 per cent of those on the road at rush hour. The traffic jam would quickly spread throughout the city because the different areas of its grid-based road network are highly connected, says Vivek.
This gridlock would vary according to the time of day. For example, if hackers stopped 20 per cent of cars at 3 am, the city鈥檚 traffic would generally keep flowing, apart from in busy areas, such as Times Square.
With the same proportion of cars halted during the day in moderate traffic, most of the avenues running north to south would still have flowing cars, but the east to west streets would be jammed. And with 20 per cent of cars stopped during rush hour, the city would become gridlocked.
Vivek and his team also analysed the locations of fire stations and hospitals. They found that gridlock would leave emergency services unable to聽reach any block except the one that contained their building.
Simon Parkinson at the University of Huddersfield, UK, says this is the first study that has been able to quantify the potential risk of widespread hacking of smart cars. Such a coordinated attack would take a lot of resources, he says, so it may be more likely that this kind of sudden and simultaneous problem could happen through a botched upgrade from the manufacturers.
It could also be much worse than a traffic jam. 鈥淭hey take a very optimistic view that these cars would just be stopping,鈥� says Parkinson. 鈥淚t depends on what kind of exploits can be found. A car could be a mobilised weapon.鈥� He also points out that hackers could wreak as much havoc by targeting smart infrastructure, such as an internet-connected road-signalling system. Then you may only have to hit a single device rather than thousands of cars to have a similar result, he says.
Though the computer model only takes into account Manhattan鈥檚 streets, it is likely that internet-connected cars would be randomly distributed throughout New York聽City, increasing the chances of the gridlock hitting the outer boroughs. The team is yet to look at what would happen in cities without a grid system, but Vivek says he would like to see whether this would ease or worsen traffic jams.聽鈥淭he structure of the city definitely plays a role,鈥� he says.
Vivek,聽who presented this research on 4 March at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Boston, is still optimistic on the future of connected cars. He聽says that manufacturers should consider using several networks with redundant security to communicate with their fleets.
