Also, it doesn't take nearly the sophistication of the system demo'ed here -- a chaff canister released into traffic would, I imagine, play twenty kinds of havoc on any autonomous driving system that relied on radar.
People who are interested in finding out more can look up Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) jammers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio_frequency_memory
I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but the link's assertion that any of these techniques are new suggests that either allaboutcircuits is not familiar with radar/electronic attack or that Duke University and/or the automative radar folks are not up to speed with techniques used in radar/electronic attack in the defense/aerospace industries. Maybe it's the latter, as the arXiv preprint states "...show the novel ability to effectively ‘add’ (i.e., false positive attacks), ‘remove’ (i.e., false negative attacks), or ‘move’ (i.e., translation attacks) object detections...".
These are open data, too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_jamming_and_deception.
The arXiv preprint doesn't list any of the usual suspects for radar or electronic attack sources that I would expect to see in its references. There are a lot of automotive radar sources and, interestingly enough, some LiDAR and LiDAR adversarial attacks instead.
Yes, their POC uses SDR
More generally maybe but not always. If you wanted to use a DRFM jammer to insert false targets in an imaging radar, the bandwidths required may be a challenge.
There are commercial SAR satellite operators that you (for some definition of you — I personally couldn’t afford it) can buy from that sell imagery that’s got a resolution of 0.5 meters per pixel. That would require a bandwidth of about 300MHz. I haven’t looked at the SDR landscape in awhile but when I did that was sort of sporty — by that I mean >300 complex megasamples a second (for Nyquist, not including any oversampling).
And that would be after basebanding in analog before sampling to digital.
This is absolutely normal when driving on American roads at night these days.
Oh, that Jeep was running red lights on the front. I thought that vehicle was heading away from me.
Every state has laws that when a vehicle is in forward motion on a road, that the only permissible colored lights are white and amber. Yes illegal.
My cousin got a new truck and he said everyone now flashes their lights at him but his lights are on low. His previous truck was fine but this new model is terrible. It's not just trucks it's cars too.
I'm ready to go to my member of parliament to ask WTF?
There is some talk about regulating minimum projected area for a given amount of power to reduce this effect somewhat.
Set some rules for how bright lights are allowed to be.
If people want to mess up traffic they can drop a concrete block off an overpass, run a heavy chain across the road, change signage, use tire shredders or do any number of antisocial things. Many of which are extremely cheap and not preventable.
Probably the most novel factor would be that sensor disruption is more deniable than many other threats to drivers.
But how much additional cost/expense would that justify? Technically mitigating every risk isn't really possible, at some point you have to fall back to the legal system.
There's another aspect to it: sure you could disrupt traffic with all the means you cited, but you had to be there physically, and you'd run the very likely risk of being caught and beaten up by angry drivers.
With invisible and electronic means like this, all it takes is to put a box with the jamming kit and a small battery near the road and you can trigger it when you're far, and you could even trigger it in many big roads at the same time and see the chaos you caused.
Why would you do that? For the same reason a few people send false bomb alerts for the police to evacuate places, and others SWAT streamers. Out of pure naughtiness.
Dropping a handful of nails over an overpass is unlikely to be noticed, much less attract retaliation from the victims
Dropping caltrops on a secondary road at night would also work. Rigging a drone to drop chaff on a freeway, etc, would also get the perpetrator physically away from the action. Really, with some creativity, surprisingly crude attacks can shut down a road with minimal exposure of the perp.
A decade ago, the Beltway Sniper terrorized my neighborhood for two weeks. It turned out to be a teenage boy and a certifiably insane adult with some military training. A similar attack by someone who actually knew what they were doing and who wasn't addled would have been very, very difficult to catch. Much less if the attack were, say, from wooded roadsides that overlooked interstates.