A study at the University of Michigan shows that traffic lights can be easily hacked, which poses a great danger to drivers.
With help from a local Michigan road agency, five researchers at the university's electrical engineering and computer science department successfully hacked about 100 wirelessly networked traffic lights, finding three huge weaknesses in the system, PC Magazine reported.
"[The] critical nature of traffic infrastructure requires that it be secure against computer-based attacks, but this is not always the case," the research team wrote in a paper titled "Green Lights Forever."
Brandan Ghena, a computer science PhD student at the university and lead researcher of the study, said people tend to assume that traffic lights are secure and put too much faith in them to work all the time, according to whotv.com.
"This is a critical infrastructure," Ghena said. "We were shocked that was going on."
The team used a laptop to change the traffic lights, which were made by Econolite, one of North America's biggest makers of signals, cameras and traffic management systems. The company's traffic lights are used in 100,000 intersections in the U.S. and Canada.
The major problem with the hacking issue is that all of today's signal systems abide by the U.S. traffic light communications standard (NTCIP 1202), which means if cities don't make changes to their default settings, all of the lights can be hacked.
The researchers said the lights can be better protected with improved security, which includes more encryption and secure passwords, as well as a better understanding of the system's weaknesses, PC Magazine reported. A more secure network will be able to fight off service attacks, light control, and traffic congestion.
"With the appropriate hardware and a little effort, an adversary can reconfigure a traffic controller to suit [their] needs," they wrote.
The team worked with local officials to prevent issues from happening to the network again in the future, providing wireless security, firmware updates, firewall, changes to default qualifications, along with other suggestions.
