Extensible FlexRay communication controller for FPGA-based automotive systems

Modern vehicles incorporate an increasing number of distributed compute nodes, resulting in the need for faster and more reliable in-vehicle networks. Time-triggered protocols such as FlexRay have been gaining ground as the standard for high-speed reliable communications in the automotive industry, marking a shift away from the event-triggered medium access used in controller area networks (CANs). These new standards enable the higher levels of determinism and reliability demanded from next-generation safety-critical applications. Advanced applications can benefit from tight coupling of the embedded computing units with the communication interface, thereby providing functionality beyond the FlexRay standard. Such an approach is highly suited to implementation on reconfigurable architectures. This paper describes a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based communication controller (CC) that features configurable extensions to provide functionality that is unavailable with standard implementations or off-the-shelf devices. It is implemented and verified on a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA, integrated with both a logic-based hardware ECU and a fully fledged processor-based electronic control unit (ECU). Results show that the platform-centric implementation generates a highly efficient core in terms of power, performance, and resource utilization. We demonstrate that the flexible extensions help enable advanced applications that integrate features such as fault tolerance, timeliness, and security, with practical case studies. This tight integration between the controller, computational functions, and flexible extensions on the controller enables enhancements that open the door for exciting applications in future vehicles

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

A robust, reliable and deployable framework for In-vehicle security

Cyber attacks on financial and government institutions, critical infrastructure, voting systems, businesses, modern vehicles, etc., are on the rise. Fully connected autonomous vehicles are more vulnerable than ever to hacking and data theft. This is due to the fact that the protocols used for in-vehicle communication i.e. controller area network (CAN), FlexRay, local interconnect network (LIN), etc., lack basic security features such as message authentication, which makes it vulnerable to a wide range of attacks including spoofing attacks. This research presents methods to protect the vehicle against spoofing attacks. The proposed methods exploit uniqueness in the electronic control unit electronic control unit (ECU) and the physical channel between transmitting and destination nodes for linking the received packet to the source. Impurities in the digital device, physical channel, imperfections in design, material, and length of the channel contribute to the uniqueness of artifacts. I propose novel techniques for electronic control unit (ECU) identification in this research to address security vulnerabilities of the in-vehicle communication. The reliable ECU identification has the potential to prevent spoofing attacks launched over the CAN due to the inconsideration of the message authentication. In this regard, my techniques models the ECU-specific random distortion caused by the imperfections in digital-to-analog converter digital to analog converter (DAC), and semiconductor impurities in the transmitting ECU for fingerprinting. I also model the channel-specific random distortion, impurities in the physical channel, imperfections in design, material, and length of the channel are contributing factors behind physically unclonable artifacts. The lumped element model is used to characterize channel-specific distortions. This research exploits the distortion of the device (ECU) and distortion due to the channel to identify the transmitter and hence authenticate the transmitter.Ph.D.College of Engineering & Computer ScienceUniversity of Michigan-Dearbornhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154568/1/Azeem Hafeez Final Disseration.pdfDescription of Azeem Hafeez Final Disseration.pdf : Dissertatio

Estudo do impacto de transientes elétricos em protocolos de comunicação em sistemas embarcados

O aumento da complexidade e responsabilidade dos dispositivos embarcados nos veículos hoje, tem orientado os esforços no desenvolvimento de sistemas de controle para que estes sejam mais rápidos, precisos, robustos e principamente seguros. Com isso, estes dispositivos estão levando os protocolos de comunicação a um patamar inédito de exigência, tanto no quesito de capacidade como confiabilidade. Protocolos como CAN, CAN-FD e FlexRay entre outros, tem sido utilizados devido às suas características de segurança e a capacidade de atender aos requisitos temporais dos diversos circuitos embarcados. O desenvolvimento e utilização cada vez mais frequente de dispositivos focados em segurança, fazem com que a comunicação entre os diversos componentes destes dispositivos seja exigida ao máximo, levando à necessidade de respostas confiáveis ao extremo. Sistemas como freios ABS, suspensão ativa, frenagem autonoma de emergência, controle de velocidade e distância adaptativo, entre outros, que envolvem várias ECUs distribuídas ao longo do veículo, dispões de frações de segundo para a reação do sistema, entre o sinal de entrada e a atuação correspondente, demandando uma comunicação segura e tolerante à falhas. Os veículos hoje estão passando por grandes mudanças conceituais, trazendo cada vez mais elementos onde o funcionamento demanda mais energia das fontes de alimentação. Diversos sistemas existentes nos veículos geram ruídos como os Transientes Elétricos Rápidos, ou "Electric Fast Transient" (EFT), que estão presentes nas mais simples operações cotidianas do veículo, como ligar e desligar o farol, o ar condicionado, o limpador de para brisas, ou mesmo o acionamento de iluminação diurna (DRL), etc. Neste trabalho foram realizados diversos ensaios, utilizando ECUs com diferentes funções e protocolos, para identificar a susceptibilidade dos referidos sistemas e os protocolos à presença destes ruídos. Visando atender às normas IEC 62228 e a ISO26262, este trabalho demandou o projeto e construção de dois circuitos eletrônicos diferentes, um circuito observando os dados de tempos de subida e de descida (rise and fall time) dos pulsos de EFT, e outro observando a arquitetura do layout da placa de circuito impresso (PCB), as suas entradas, saídas, componentes, etc. Estes ensaios visaram identificar o quanto estes protocolos são suscetíveis à estes tipos de ruídos, utilizando métricas de análise baseadas nos tempos de latência e variação de jitter dos pacotes de comunicação.The increasing complexity and accountability of embedded devices in vehicles today has driven efforts to develop control systems to make them faster, accuratest, safest, robustest. Thus, these devices are taking communication protocols to an unprecedented level of demand, both in terms of capacity and reliability. Protocols such as CAN, CANFD and FlexRay among others have been used due to their safety characteristics and the ability to meet the time requirements of various embedded circuits. The increasing development and use of safety-focused devices, means that communication between the various components of these devices is required to the utmost, leading to the need for extremely reliable responses. Systems such as ABS brakes, active suspension, autonomous emergency braking, adaptative cruise control, among others, which involve various ECUs distributed throughout the vehicle, have milliseconds for system reaction, between input signal and concrete actuation, requiring safe and failure tolerant communication. Vehicles today are undergoing major conceptual changes, bringing more and more elements whose operation require more energy from power supplies. These systems generate noise such as "Electric Fast Transient" (EFT), which are present in the simplest daily operations of the vehicle, such as turning the headlight on, the air conditioner, the windscreen wiper, or even the daytime running light (DRL), etc. In this work several tests were carried out, using different ECUs with different functions and different protocols to identify the susceptibility of these systems and the protocols to these noises. In order to comply with IEC 62228 and ISO 26262 standards, this work required the design and construction of two different electronic circuits, one circuit observing the rise and fall time data of the EFT pulses, and the other observing the architecture of the printed circuit board (PCB) layout, its inputs and outputs, components, etc. These tests aimed to identify how susceptible these protocols are to these types of noise, using analysis metrics based on latency time and jitter variation of communication packets

A qualitative cybersecurity analysis of time-triggered communication networks in automotive systems

© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Security is gaining increasing importance in automotive systems, driven by technical innovations. For example, automotive vehicles become more open systems, allowing the communication with other traffic participants and road infrastructure. Also, automotive vehicles are provided with increased autonomy which raises severe safety concerns, and consequently also security concerns – both concerns that interweave in such systems. In this paper we present a qualitative cybersecurity analysis by comparing different time-triggered (TT) communication networks. While TT communication networks have been analysed extensively for dependability, the contribution of this work is to identify security-related benefits that TT communication networks can provide. In particular, their mechanisms for spacial and temporal encapsulation of network traffic are instrumental to improve network security. The security arguments can be used as a design guide for implementing critical communication in flexible network standards like TSN.Peer reviewe

Machine learning and blockchain technologies for cybersecurity in connected vehicles

Future connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) must be secured againstcyberattacks for their everyday functions on the road so that safety of passengersand vehicles can be ensured. This article presents a holistic review of cybersecurityattacks on sensors and threats regardingmulti-modal sensor fusion. A compre-hensive review of cyberattacks on intra-vehicle and inter-vehicle communicationsis presented afterward. Besides the analysis of conventional cybersecurity threatsand countermeasures for CAV systems,a detailed review of modern machinelearning, federated learning, and blockchain approach is also conducted to safe-guard CAVs. Machine learning and data mining-aided intrusion detection systemsand other countermeasures dealing with these challenges are elaborated at theend of the related section. In the last section, research challenges and future direc-tions are identified

Automotive Ethernet architecture and security: challenges and technologies

Vehicle infrastructure must address the challenges posed by today's advances toward connected and autonomous vehicles. To allow for more flexible architectures, high-bandwidth connections and scalability are needed to connect many sensors and electronic control units (ECUs). At the same time, deterministic and low latency is a critical and significant design requirement to support urgent real-time applications in autonomous vehicles. As a recent solution, the time-sensitive network (TSN) was introduced as Ethernet-based amendments in IEEE 802.1 TSN standards to meet those needs. However, it had hurdle to be overcome before it can be used effectively. This paper discusses the latest studies concerning the automotive Ethernet requirements, including transmission delay studies to improve worst-case end-to-end delay and end-to-end jitter. Also, the paper focuses on the securing Ethernet-based in-vehicle networks (IVNs) by reviewing new encryption and authentication methods and approaches

A NOVEL APPROACH FOR FLEXRAY PROTOCOL WITH CONFIDENTIALITY AND AUTHENTICITY

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN