Robust and secure resource management for automotive cyber-physical systems

2022 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Modern vehicles are examples of complex cyber-physical systems with tens to hundreds of interconnected Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that manage various vehicular subsystems. With the shift towards autonomous driving, emerging vehicles are being characterized by an increase in the number of hardware ECUs, greater complexity of applications (software), and more sophisticated in-vehicle networks. These advances have resulted in numerous challenges that impact the reliability, security, and real-time performance of these emerging automotive systems. Some of the challenges include coping with computation and communication uncertainties (e.g., jitter), developing robust control software, detecting cyber-attacks, ensuring data integrity, and enabling confidentiality during communication. However, solutions to overcome these challenges incur additional overhead, which can catastrophically delay the execution of real-time automotive tasks and message transfers. Hence, there is a need for a holistic approach to a system-level solution for resource management in automotive cyber-physical systems that enables robust and secure automotive system design while satisfying a diverse set of system-wide constraints. ECUs in vehicles today run a variety of automotive applications ranging from simple vehicle window control to highly complex Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) applications. The aggressive attempts of automakers to make vehicles fully autonomous have increased the complexity and data rate requirements of applications and further led to the adoption of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques for improved perception and control. Additionally, modern vehicles are becoming increasingly connected with various external systems to realize more robust vehicle autonomy. These paradigm shifts have resulted in significant overheads in resource constrained ECUs and increased the complexity of the overall automotive system (including heterogeneous ECUs, network architectures, communication protocols, and applications), which has severe performance and safety implications on modern vehicles. The increased complexity of automotive systems introduces several computation and communication uncertainties in automotive subsystems that can cause delays in applications and messages, resulting in missed real-time deadlines. Missing deadlines for safety-critical automotive applications can be catastrophic, and this problem will be further aggravated in the case of future autonomous vehicles. Additionally, due to the harsh operating conditions (such as high temperatures, vibrations, and electromagnetic interference (EMI)) of automotive embedded systems, there is a significant risk to the integrity of the data that is exchanged between ECUs which can lead to faulty vehicle control. These challenges demand a more reliable design of automotive systems that is resilient to uncertainties and supports data integrity goals. Additionally, the increased connectivity of modern vehicles has made them highly vulnerable to various kinds of sophisticated security attacks. Hence, it is also vital to ensure the security of automotive systems, and it will become crucial as connected and autonomous vehicles become more ubiquitous. However, imposing security mechanisms on the resource constrained automotive systems can result in additional computation and communication overhead, potentially leading to further missed deadlines. Therefore, it is crucial to design techniques that incur very minimal overhead (lightweight) when trying to achieve the above-mentioned goals and ensure the real-time performance of the system. We address these issues by designing a holistic resource management framework called ROSETTA that enables robust and secure automotive cyber-physical system design while satisfying a diverse set of constraints related to reliability, security, real-time performance, and energy consumption. To achieve reliability goals, we have developed several techniques for reliability-aware scheduling and multi-level monitoring of signal integrity. To achieve security objectives, we have proposed a lightweight security framework that provides confidentiality and authenticity while meeting both security and real-time constraints. We have also introduced multiple deep learning based intrusion detection systems (IDS) to monitor and detect cyber-attacks in the in-vehicle network. Lastly, we have introduced novel techniques for jitter management and security management and deployed lightweight IDSs on resource constrained automotive ECUs while ensuring the real-time performance of the automotive systems

Interactive design space exploration of real-time embedded systems

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Automotive embedded systems software reprogramming

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThe exponential growth of computer power is no longer limited to stand alone computing systems but applies to all areas of commercial embedded computing systems. The ongoing rapid growth in intelligent embedded systems is visible in the commercial automotive area, where a modern car today implements up to 80 different electronic control units (ECUs) and their total memory size has been increased to several hundreds of megabyte. This growth in the commercial mass production world has led to new challenges, even within the automotive industry but also in other business areas where cost pressure is high. The need to drive cost down means that every cent spent on recurring engineering costs needs to be justified. A conflict between functional requirements (functionality, system reliability, production and manufacturing aspects etc.), testing and maintainability aspects is given. Software reprogramming, as a key issue within the automotive industry, solve that given conflict partly in the past. Software Reprogramming for in-field service and maintenance in the after sales markets provides a strong method to fix previously not identified software errors. But the increasing software sizes and therefore the increasing software reprogramming times will reduce the benefits. Especially if ECU’s software size growth faster than vehicle’s onboard infrastructure can be adjusted. The thesis result enables cost prediction of embedded systems’ software reprogramming by generating an effective and reliable model for reprogramming time for different existing and new technologies. This model and additional research results contribute to a timeline for short term, mid term and long term solutions which will solve the currently given problems as well as future challenges, especially for the automotive industry but also for all other business areas where cost pressure is high and software reprogramming is a key issue during products life cycle

A framework for assertion-based timing verification and PC-based restbus simulation of automotive systems

Innovation in der Automobilindustrie wird durch Elektronik und vor allem durch Software ermöglicht. In der Regel wird eine Vielzahl von verteilten Funktionen realisiert. Typischerweise, wird diese Software über mehrere Steuergeräte verteilt. Durch die Verteilung und die Vielzahl an Funktionen ensteht eine immer wachsende Komplexität, die den Verifikations- und Validierungsprozess anspruchsvoller und schwieriger gestaltet. Daher ist für Ingenieure in der Automobilindustrie die Entwicklung von effizienten und effektiven Design-Methoden von großem Interesse.Ein zentrales Element in der Entwicklung automobiler Software ist der komponentebasierten Ansatz. Derzeit ist AUTOSAR der wichtigste Standard, der dieses Paradigma unterstützt. Die Systembeschreibungssprache SystemC ist ebenfalls ein Mittel, um AUTOSAR-Komponenten simulieren zu können. Desweiteren stellt SystemC einen Satz von Bibliotheken zur Verfügung wie zum Beispiel die „SystemC Verification Library“ (SCV), und einen diskreten Event-Simulationskern. Inzwischen ist das Interesse an der Verwendung von SystemC in der automobile Softwareentwicklung stark gestiegen.In dieser Arbeit stellen wir eine SystemC-basierte Entwurfsmethodik für eine frühe Validierung zeitkritischer automobile Systeme vor. Die Methodik reicht von einer reinen SystemC-Simulation bis zu einer PC-basierten Restbussimulation. Um die Synchronisation bezüglich Überabtastung und Unterabtastung zwischen dem SystemC-Simulationsmodell und dem Restbus während der Restbussimulation zu gewährleisten, präsentieren wir ein Synchronisationsverfahren. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurde für die Integration von SystemC-Komponenten IP-XACT als Modelierungsstandard verwendet. Um eine Zeitanalyse ermöglichen zu können, stellen wir Erweiterungen für den IP-XACT-Standard vor, mit deren Hilfe Zeitanforderungen anAutomotive system innovation is mainly driven by software which can be distributed over a large number of functions typically deployed over several ECUs. This growing design complexity makes the verification and validation process challenging and difficult. Therefore, the development of efficient and effective design methodologies is of great interest for automotive engineers.A central concept in the development of automotive software is the component-based approach. Currently, the most prominent approach that supports this design paradigm is the AUTOSAR. The SLDL SystemC provides means to simulate the behavior of AUTOSAR software components by means of a discrete-event simulation kernel. Additionally, SystemC comes with a set of libraries such as the SCV. Meanwhile, the interest of using SystemC has grown in the automotive software development community. In this thesis we present a SystemC-based design methodology for early validation of time-critical automotive systems. The methodology spans from pure SystemC simulation to PC-based Restbus simulation. To deal with synchronization issues (oversampling and undersampling) that arise during Restbus simulation between the SystemC simulation model and the remaining bus network, we also present a new synchronization approach. Finally, we make use IP-XACT for SystemC component integration. To capture timing constraints on the simulation model, we propose timing extensions for the IP-XACT standard. These timing constraints can then be used to verify the SystemC simulation model.Tag der Verteidigung: 11.09.2015Paderborn, Univ., Diss., 201

Predicate-aware, makespan-preserving software pipelining of scheduling tables

International audienceWe propose a software pipelining technique adapted to specific hard real-time scheduling problems. Our technique optimizes both computation throughput and execution cycle makespan, with makespan being prioritary. It also takes advantage of the predicated execution mechanisms of our embedded execution plat-form. To do so, it uses a reservation table formalism allowing the manipulation of the execution conditions of operations. Our reservation tables allow the double reservation of a resource at the same dates by two different operations, if the operations have exclusive execution conditions. Our analyses can determine when double reservation is possible even for operations belonging to different iterations