Can Traffic Signals Turn All Green? (The Italian Job)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 ธ.ค. 2022
- In the movie The Italian Job (2003), traffic signals are hacked by the character Lyle and he turns all the lights green. As a traffic engineer, I wonder and speculate if this is possible to do quickly in real life.
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This was very interesting! Becoming a traffic engineer really paid off 😄
Thanks, Anna. This was a fun video to talk about :)
Very interesting! I haven’t seen a stoplight showing all green before, but I did once see a malfunctioning light show a solid green light with the red light flashing at the same time. I’m not sure if the other sides of the intersection had the same signal, but it definitely was unique.
That must've been a sight to see!
Remotely triggered, it doesn't sound very plausible.
Sounds to me like you'd have to physically access the controller, dump the firmware, decrypt & reverse engineer the bin, modify it to allow for all Greens, then reflash the controller
I agree, it seems to be a very difficult challenge. But I feel as soon as I say it’s not possible, someone will come in and prove me wrong!
With physical access and enough time it's obviously possible.
But as far as (somewhat) remotely without physical access, since there's no remote connection service of any kind, the only way I could really see it being done, is somehow triggering the Opticom on both intersectional traffic lights concurrently.
The attacker (or a node that he controls) would need to be in close range for that 14mhz IR blast to work on both lights (and the passcode if the Opticom requires one) so they'd need a second person, but I'm SURE the firmware in the light's controller accounts for this, as well as the CMU/MMU searching for anomalies, so it would have to leverage an exploit in the controller firmware with how it handles Opticom signals to change the light, and somehow also avoid tripping the CMU/MMU
That's the only potential vulnerability I could see based on what you've described. Difficult, yes, especially black boxing it, but imo definitely plausible, IF there was a dev oversight with how it handles concurrent 10mhz/12mhz/14mhz Opticom IR triggers
EDIT/TL;DR: Sorry for the long rant 😅 but I would love to hear your thoughts on the Opticom as an attack vector when you get a chance. I work in cybersecurity so this kind of stuff fascinates me
EDIT 2: Just realized Opticom doesn't just make your light green, it also makes all the others red. So you'd have to somehow sever the connection between the intersection lights after triggering the first Opticom, then trigger the 2nd, which the controller would never allow. Seems pretty solid to me 🤷♂️😂 but Opticom imo is still the weakest point. It's akin to having an exposed API that directly controls a traffic light, just more secure than an exposed API
Fascinating. A lot of what you discuss is more advanced than I can comment on (I don't have a cybersecurity background). But, I don't see how that would avoid tripping the CMU/MMU
@@ByronTang yeah sorry I kinda ranted there haha.
Oh it definitely wouldn't avoid tripping the CMU/MMU unless you discovered a flaw in the design and exploited it, like rapidly spamming multiple Opticom calls for to overflow the memory buffer or something.
But even if you accomplished that, you'd somehow need a way to inject and execute your own code, wirelessly, and even if you could somehow do that, it'd get picked up by the CMU/MMU anyway - you'd have to exploit both concurrently without tripping either one, and the worst damage someone could probably do with a wireless attack is make all the lights flash red lol
I don't really see a way to do it without physical access but who knows, some people are insane 🤣 definitely above my pay grade to crack that one
@@alienJIZ1990 For my own profession's sake and public safety, I sure hope people don't figure out how to remotely hack a traffic signal :)
Good to know