MAGIC: Meeting Automotive Liability Challenges through Forensics Soundness

Research Project, 2024 – 2027

The vehicle industry has a long tradition of working actively with safety, both to prevent accidents and to investigate the root cause of accidents. In contrast, cybersecurity is a relatively new area within the automotive industry, where regulations recently have begun to put requirements on vehicle manufacturers.

One topic subject to regulatory requirements is the digital forensics capability of a vehicle, a new and unexplored area for the automotive industry. Upcoming regulations, including the EU's updated Product Liability Directive, are expected to place a greater burden of proof on vehicle manufacturers, requiring them to demonstrate that their products, including cybersecurity features, are free of defects.

This project aims to provide the automotive industry with tools in processes, methods, and mechanisms to aid forensics investigations and support liability investigations throughout the entire vehicle lifecycle, from development to deployment and post-incident analysis. The benefits include more efficient root cause analysis that can lead to faster product updates to address potential vulnerabilities, increased trust in vehicle digital forensics evidence, and guidance to engineers who want to design a vehicle to aid forensics analysis. The forensics area is considered more mature for neighbouring domains such as IT and telecom. Hence, these domains will be analysed for potential adaptation to automotive. To reduce the amount of manual labour to analyse vehicle data, the project will investigate how modern AI technologies can make this process more efficient.