Spoofing what the machine believes.

GNSS, LiDAR, and optical flow. Attacking perception instead of the software that consumes it.

An autonomous system is a machine that acts on what it believes. Every finding in this piece attacks the belief rather than the code — the software behaves perfectly, on inputs that are lies.

GNSS

Position spoofing is well documented and increasingly cheap. What is less discussed is how gracefully a flight stack degrades when position disagrees with inertial measurement. In our bench testing, most stacks trust GNSS and log the discrepancy.

LiDAR and optical flow

• Injected returns that create obstacles which are not there, forcing an avoidance manoeuvre.
• Absorbed returns that remove obstacles which are.
• Optical flow defeated by projected texture on a featureless surface.

Sensor fusion is a security control

Treat disagreement between sensors as a security event, not just a navigation one. A system that cross-checks GNSS against inertial and visual odometry, and refuses to act when they diverge beyond a threshold, is meaningfully harder to steer from outside.