February 25, 2025
Keio University
Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)
In a joint effort, Senior Assistant Professor Kentaro Yoshioka from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Science and Technology at Keio University, along with master's students Yuki Hayakawa and Ryo Suzuki from the same graduate school, and Assistant Professor Alfred Chen and doctoral student Takami Sato from the University of California, Irvine, have discovered a new vulnerability in the LiDAR sensor systems of autonomous vehicles. This research team is the first in the world to demonstrate that the LiDAR sensors of a vehicle traveling at high speed can be disabled from a long distance, and they have proposed necessary countermeasures to achieve safe autonomous driving.
While autonomous driving technology holds the potential to significantly transform our future society, improving its safety is essential. In this study, the team developed a system capable of tracking the sensors of a high-speed vehicle and confirmed that the sensors of a vehicle traveling at 60 km/h could be disabled from a distance of 110 meters. They also discovered a new method that can bypass existing defense mechanisms, even in the latest LiDAR sensors. Furthermore, through demonstration experiments with a vehicle equipped with open-source autonomous driving software (Autoware), they revealed that disabling the sensors could lead to a risk of collision or system shutdown. These research findings highlight the importance of sensor security for autonomous vehicles and provide crucial insights that will lead to the development of more robust safety measures.
The findings of this research were accepted for presentation at the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025, a top-tier international conference in the security field, held from February 24 to 27, 2025, and the paper was published online on February 21, 2025. The newly discovered vulnerability has been shared with various LiDAR manufacturers, and these research findings are being released after a certain period to allow for countermeasures to be developed.
For the full press release, please see below.