On the Secure and Resilient Design of Connected Vehicles: Methods and Guidelines

Vehicles have come a long way from being purely mechanical systems to systems that consist of an internal network of more than 100 microcontrollers and systems that communicate with external entities, such as other vehicles, road infrastructure, the manufacturer’s cloud and external applications. This combination of resource constraints, safety-criticality, large attack surface and the fact that millions of people own and use them each day, makes securing vehicles particularly challenging as security practices and methods need to be tailored to meet these requirements.This thesis investigates how security demands should be structured to ease discussions and collaboration between the involved parties and how requirements engineering can be accelerated by introducing generic security requirements. Practitioners are also assisted in choosing appropriate techniques for securing vehicles by identifying and categorising security and resilience techniques suitable for automotive systems. Furthermore, three specific mechanisms for securing automotive systems and providing resilience are designed and evaluated. The first part focuses on cyber security requirements and the identification of suitable techniques based on three different approaches, namely (i) providing a mapping to security levels based on a review of existing security standards and recommendations; (ii) proposing a taxonomy for resilience techniques based on a literature review; and (iii) combining security and resilience techniques to protect automotive assets that have been subject to attacks. The second part presents the design and evaluation of three techniques. First, an extension for an existing freshness mechanism to protect the in-vehicle communication against replay attacks is presented and evaluated. Second, a trust model for Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication is developed with respect to cyber resilience to allow a vehicle to include trust in neighbouring vehicles in its decision-making processes. Third, a framework is presented that enables vehicle manufacturers to protect their fleet by detecting anomalies and security attacks using vehicle trust and the available data in the cloud

Emerging privacy challenges and approaches in CAV systems

The growth of Internet-connected devices, Internet-enabled services and Internet of Things systems continues at a rapid pace, and their application to transport systems is heralded as game-changing. Numerous developing CAV (Connected and Autonomous Vehicle) functions, such as traffic planning, optimisation, management, safety-critical and cooperative autonomous driving applications, rely on data from various sources. The efficacy of these functions is highly dependent on the dimensionality, amount and accuracy of the data being shared. It holds, in general, that the greater the amount of data available, the greater the efficacy of the function. However, much of this data is privacy-sensitive, including personal, commercial and research data. Location data and its correlation with identity and temporal data can help infer other personal information, such as home/work locations, age, job, behavioural features, habits, social relationships. This work categorises the emerging privacy challenges and solutions for CAV systems and identifies the knowledge gap for future research, which will minimise and mitigate privacy concerns without hampering the efficacy of the functions

Governing autonomous vehicles: emerging responses for safety, liability, privacy, cybersecurity, and industry risks

The benefits of autonomous vehicles (AVs) are widely acknowledged, but there are concerns about the extent of these benefits and AV risks and unintended consequences. In this article, we first examine AVs and different categories of the technological risks associated with them. We then explore strategies that can be adopted to address these risks, and explore emerging responses by governments for addressing AV risks. Our analyses reveal that, thus far, governments have in most instances avoided stringent measures in order to promote AV developments and the majority of responses are non-binding and focus on creating councils or working groups to better explore AV implications. The US has been active in introducing legislations to address issues related to privacy and cybersecurity. The UK and Germany, in particular, have enacted laws to address liability issues, other countries mostly acknowledge these issues, but have yet to implement specific strategies. To address privacy and cybersecurity risks strategies ranging from introduction or amendment of non-AV specific legislation to creating working groups have been adopted. Much less attention has been paid to issues such as environmental and employment risks, although a few governments have begun programmes to retrain workers who might be negatively affected.Comment: Transport Reviews, 201

MobileTrust: Secure Knowledge Integration in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and ambient intelligence applications. In such networks, secure resource sharing functionality is accomplished by incorporating trust schemes. Current solutions adopt peer-to-peer technologies that can cover the large operational area. However, these systems fail to capture some inherent properties of VANETs, such as fast and ephemeral interaction, making robust trust evaluation of crowdsourcing challenging. In this article, we propose MobileTrust—a hybrid trust-based system for secure resource sharing in VANETs. The proposal is a breakthrough in centralized trust computing that utilizes cloud and upcoming 5G technologies to provide robust trust establishment with global scalability. The ad hoc communication is energy-efficient and protects the system against threats that are not countered by the current settings. To evaluate its performance and effectiveness, MobileTrust is modelled in the SUMO simulator and tested on the traffic features of the small-size German city of Eichstatt. Similar schemes are implemented in the same platform to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, MobileTrust is deployed on a typical embedded system platform and applied on a real smart car installation for monitoring traffic and road-state parameters of an urban application. The proposed system is developed under the EU-founded THREAT-ARREST project, to provide security, privacy, and trust in an intelligent and energy-aware transportation scenario, bringing closer the vision of sustainable circular economy

Cyber-security internals of a Skoda Octavia vRS:a hands on approach

The convergence of information technology and vehicular technologies are a growing paradigm, allowing information to be sent by and to vehicles. This information can further be processed by the Electronic Control Unit (ECU) and the Controller Area Network (CAN) for in-vehicle communications or through a mobile phone or server for out-vehicle communication. Information sent by or to the vehicle can be life-critical (e.g. breaking, acceleration, cruise control, emergency communication, etc. . . ). As vehicular technology advances, in-vehicle networks are connected to external networks through 3 and 4G mobile networks, enabling manufacturer and customer monitoring of different aspects of the car. While these services provide valuable information, they also increase the attack surface of the vehicle, and can enable long and short range attacks. In this manuscript, we evaluate the security of the 2017 Skoda Octavia vRS 4x4. Both physical and remote attacks are considered, the key fob rolling code is successfully compromised, privacy attacks are demonstrated through the infotainment system, the Volkswagen Transport Protocol 2.0 is reverse engineered. Additionally, in-car attacks are highlighted and described, providing an overlook of potentially deadly threats by modifying ECU parameters and components enabling digital forensics investigation are identified