Clever Decoys Via Chaff Bugs To Ward Off Self-Driving Car Cyber-Hackers

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

In the movie remake of the Thomas Crown Affair, the main character opts to go into an art museum to ostensibly steal a famous work of art, and does so attired in the manner of The Son of Man artwork (a man wearing a bowler hat and an overcoat).

Spoiler alert, he arranges for dozens of other men to come into the museum dressed similarly as he, thus confounding the efforts by the waiting police that had been tipped that he would come there to commit his thievery. By having many men serving as decoys, he pulls off the effort and the police are exasperated at having to check the numerous decoys and yet are unable to nab him (he sneakily changes his clothes).

This ploy was a clever use of deception.

During World War II, there was the invention of chaff, which was also a form of deception.

Radar had just emerged as a means to detect flying airplanes and therefore be able to try and more accurately shoot them down. The radar device would send a signal that would bounce off the airplane and provide a return to the radar device, thus allowing detection of where the airplane was.

It was hypothesized that there might be a means to confuse the radar device by putting something into the air that would seem like an airplane but was not an airplane. At first, the idea was to have something suspended from an airplane or maybe have balloons or parachutes that could contain a material that would bounce back the radar signals.

A flying airplane could potentially release the parachutes or balloons that had the radar reflecting material.

After exploring this notion, it was further advanced by the discovery that pieces of metal foil could be dropped from the airplane and that it was an easier way to create this deception.

The first versions were envisioned as acting in a double-duty fashion, doing so by being the size of a sheet of paper and contain propaganda written on them. This would be…