A Roadmap for Securing Vehicles against Cyber Attacks

Paper in proceeding, 2008

Emerging trends are vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle communication to improve the safety and comfort of the drivers by providing real-time traffic congestion information, collision warnings, and allowing firmware updates over the air. Computing and communication in the vehicle is thus integrated with monitoring of entities in the physical world resulting in the creation of a cyber-physical system (CPS). However, allowing the physical world to interact with the in-vehicle network introduces a number of security risks including cyber attacks targeting vehicle functionality and maneuverability. Thus, there is an emerging need for securing vehicles against these attacks. A roadmap for the automotive industry is to follow a defense-in-depth approach. There are substantial challenges for securing vehicles against cyber attacks, and design and implementation of security solutions must be made with careful consideration to the resource-constrained ECUs and the real-time constraints in the in-vehicle network.