How safe can an autonomous car be?

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We recently talked about the big questions around autonomous cars, driving levels and other details, but definitely one of the most relevant questions in this regard is how safe are these devices?

Many may think that safety is not so relevant but, for some time now, several experts on the subject have been talking about tricking the GPS to manipulate the navigation and change the destination point of a certain prey!

Navigation using GPS

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It is clear that, the above, sounds like something out of a science fiction movie but, some security analysts “ultra-geeks” have proven that, in fact, it is possible to do it with some apps under certain conditions. Therefore, in the near future, it could happen with an autonomous car or, worse still, with the entire fleet (since the concept of collective learning is a reality).

So, what can you expect from a device like autonomous cars that, for some, using a crude analogy, could be the equivalent of a mobile phone on wheels that needs to be updated and protected against the latest vulnerabilities to avoid falling prey to the cybercriminals,

Autonomous carpooling

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For all the above, we consulted Ignacio Triana (who is the Trend Micro expert in Latin America), in order to understand what we are doing in terms of autonomous car safety in relevant fields such as:

The vehicle as such,
Cloud,
Shared data,
IoT and interconnection
The network and city infrastructure (Internet of cities)
Vulnerabilities,
The standards,
Collective learning and the risk of the concept of “what happens to one member of the fleet, happens to everyone”,
Shared autonomous transport (ridesharing or carpool),
Information privacy,
Control levels,
Ransomware or car-level botnets,

Who is in charge of security at the level of an autonomous car?

To understand first-hand the risks involved in this concept of autonomous cars, it is worth watching the full interview about it (in case of problems viewing the video, click here).