In movies like Die Hard 4 and The Italian Job, hijacking traffic lights over the internet looks easy. But real-world traffic-light hacking, demonstrated by security researchers in years past, has proven tougher, requiring someone to be within radio range of every target light. Now a pair of Dutch researchers has shown how hackers really can spoof traffic data to mess with traffic lights easily from any internet connection—though luckily not in a Hollywood style that would cause mass collisions.
At the Defcon hacker conference Thursday, Dutch security researchers Rik van Duijn and Wesley Neelen will present their findings about vulnerabilities in an "intelligent transport" system that would allow them to influence traffic lights in at least 10 different cities in the Netherlands over the internet. Their hack would spoof nonexistent bicycles approaching an intersection, tricking the traffic system into giving those bicycles a green light and showing a red light to any other vehicles trying to cross in a perpendicular direction. They warn that their simple technique—which they say hasn't been fixed in all the cases where they tested it—could potentially be used to annoy drivers left waiting at an empty intersection. Or if the intelligent transport systems are implemented at a much larger scale, it could potentially even cause widespread traffic jams.
"We were able to fake a cyclist, so that the system was seeing a cyclist at the intersection, and we could do it from any location," says Neelen. "We could do the same trick at a lot of traffic lights at the same time, from my home, and it would allow you to interrupt the traffic flow across a city."
Neelen and van Duijn, who are cofounders of the applied security resear ..
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