Online discussion could foster more democratically focused citizens – but only if the forums in which they take place are designed with this aim in mind

Political discussion is increasingly moving online, however critics of social media will often refer to the aggressive and confrontational nature of many such discussions, particularly where anonymity is involved. Kim Strandberg shares the results of a research study which shows that this need not be the case, with rules and good design able to foster the kind of debate which could help to facilitate deliberative democracy

Towards a Secure and Resilient Vehicle Design: Methodologies, Principles and Guidelines

The advent of autonomous and connected vehicles has brought new cyber security challenges to the automotive industry. It requires vehicles to be designed to remain dependable in the occurrence of cyber-attacks. A modern vehicle can contain over 150 computers, over 100 million lines of code, and various connection interfaces such as USB ports, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 4G/5G. The continuous technological advancements within the automotive industry allow safety enhancements due to increased control of, e.g., brakes, steering, and the engine. Although the technology is beneficial, its complexity has the side-effect to give rise to a multitude of vulnerabilities that might leverage the potential for cyber-attacks. Consequently, there is an increase in regulations that demand compliance with vehicle cyber security and resilience requirements that state vehicles should be designed to be resilient to cyber-attacks with the capability to detect and appropriately respond to these attacks. Moreover, increasing requirements for automotive digital forensic capabilities are beginning to emerge. Failures in automated driving functions can be caused by hardware and software failures as well as cyber security issues. It is imperative to investigate the cause of these failures. However, there is currently no clear guidance on how to comply with these regulations from a technical perspective.In this thesis, we propose a methodology to predict and mitigate vulnerabilities in vehicles using a systematic approach for security analysis; a methodology further used to develop a framework ensuring a resilient and secure vehicle design concerning a multitude of analyzed vehicle cyber-attacks. Moreover, we review and analyze scientific literature on resilience techniques, fault tolerance, and dependability for attack detection, mitigation, recovery, and resilience endurance. These techniques are then further incorporated into the above-mentioned framework. Finally, to meet requirements to hastily and securely patch the increasing number of bugs in vehicle software, we propose a versatile framework for vehicle software updates

Online Newspapers’ Readers’ Comments - Democratic Conversation Platforms or Virtual Soapboxes?

Online discussions between citizens have been subject to scholarly debate and several empirical studies for a substantial period of time. Scholars have envisioned these as potential venues for citizens’ deliberation. Often, however, empirical findings do not support these notions. The quality of discussion is often not up to the standards of truly deliberative discussions. Nonetheless, there are strains of evidence suggesting that online discussion venues applying facilitators, fixed topics and actively enforcing discussion rules, may avoid many of the problems with discussion quality. This article therefore examines whether readers’ comments on a Finnish newspaper’s website resemble democratic conversations. During the course of three weeks in spring 2010, we content analyze 300 reader comments. Our findings indicate that although there are strains of democratic conversations to be found in online reader comments, there are also many instances in which the opposite holds true

A Systematic Literature Review on Automotive Digital Forensics: Challenges, Technical Solutions and Data Collection

A modern vehicle has a complex internal architecture and is wirelessly connected to the Internet, other vehicles, and the infrastructure. The risk of cyber attacks and other criminal incidents along with recent road accidents caused by autonomous vehicles calls for more research on automotive digital forensics. Failures in automated driving functions can be caused by hardware and software failures and cyber security issues. Thus, it is imperative to be able to determine and investigate the cause of these failures, something which requires trustable data. However, automotive digital forensics is a relatively new field for the automotive where most existing self-monitoring and diagnostic systems in vehicles only monitor safety-related events. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first systematic literature review on the current research within this field. We identify and assess over 300 papers published between 2006 - 2021 and further map the relevant papers to different categories based on identified focus areas to give a comprehensive overview of the forensics field and the related research activities. Moreover, we identify forensically relevant data from the literature, link the data to categories, and further map them to required security properties and potential stakeholders. Our categorization makes it easy for practitioners and researchers to quickly find relevant work within a particular sub-field of digital forensics. We believe our contributions can guide digital forensic investigations in automotive and similar areas, such as cyber-physical systems and smart cities, facilitate further research, and serve as a guideline for engineers implementing forensics mechanisms

UniSUF: a unified software update framework for vehicles utilizing isolation techniques and trusted execution environments

Today’s vehicles depend more and more on software, and can contain over 100M lines of code controlling many safety-critical functions, such as steering and brakes. Increased complexity in software inherently increases the number of bugs affecting vehicle safety-critical functions. Consequently, software updates need to be applied regularly. Current research around vehicle software update solutions is lacking necessary details for a versatile, unified and secure approach that covers various update scenarios, e.g., over-the-air, with a workshop computer, at factory production or using a diagnostic update tool. We propose UniSUF, a Unified Software Update Framework for Vehicles, well aligned with automotive industry stakeholders. All data needed for a complete software update is securely encapsulated into one single file. This vehicle unique file can be processed in multitudes of update scenarios and executed without any external connectivity since all data is inherently secured. To the best of our knowledge, this comprehensive, versatile and unified approach cannot be found in previous research and is a contribution to an essential requirement within the industry for handling the increasing complexity related to vehicle software updates

Puzzles in affective polarization research : party attitudes, partisan social distance, and multiple party identification

Affective polarization refers to people having favorable attitudes toward their preferred political parties, or inparties, along with their supporters, and negative attitudes toward other parties, or outparties, and their supporters. Originally an American concept, there is now growing interest in studying (AP) in European countries characterized by multiparty systems. So far, researchers have primarily focused on like-dislike ratings when measuring affect, which has relegated another important aspect to the background, namely attitudes toward ordinary supporters of parties. Open questions also remain relating to how political ingroups and outgroups should be conceptualized in situations with large numbers of relevant political parties. We examine these puzzles using data from an online panel in Finland. First, we measure partisan social distance, or feelings toward interacting with supporters of different parties, in addition to commonly used like-dislike ratings of parties. We find that social distance differs from party like-dislike ratings in that respondents are less likely to report animosity toward outparty supporters. Second, we measure multiple party identification based on party support and closeness, and find that people commonly have not one, but many potential inparties. Finally, we build two individual-level AP measures and apply them using both like-dislike ratings and social distance scales. One of the measures is based on identifying a single inparty, while the other takes the possibility of multiple inparties into account. We find that choosing which type of attitude to measure is more consequential for the outcome than how partisanship is operationalized. Our results and discussion clarify relationships between AP and related constructs, and highlight the necessity to consider the political and social context when measuring AP and interpreting results.Peer reviewe

Resilient Shield: Reinforcing the Resilience of Vehicles Against Security Threats

Vehicles have become complex computer systems with multiple communication interfaces. In the future, vehicles will have even more connections to e.g., infrastructure, pedestrian smartphones, cloud, road-side-units and the Internet. External and physical interfaces, as well as internal communication buses have shown to have potential to be exploited for attack purposes. As a consequence, there is an increase in regulations which demand compliance with vehicle cyber resilience requirements. However, there is currently no clear guidance on how to comply with these regulations from a technical perspective.To address this issue, we have performed a comprehensive threat and risk analysis based on published attacks against vehicles from the past 10 years, from which we further derive necessary security and resilience techniques. The work is done using the SPMT methodology where we identify vital vehicle assets, threat actors, their motivations and objectives, and develop a comprehensive threat model. Moreover, we develop a comprehensive attack model by analyzing the identified threats and attacks. These attacks are filtered and categorized based on attack type, probability, and consequence criteria. Additionally, we perform an exhaustive mapping between asset, attack, threat actor, threat category, and required mitigation mechanism for each attack, resulting in a presentation of a secure and resilient vehicle design. Ultimately, we present the Resilient Shield a novel and imperative framework to justify and ensure security and resilience within the automotive domain

REMIND: A Framework for the Resilient Design of Automotive Systems

In the past years, great effort has been spent on enhancing the security and safety of vehicular systems. Current advances in information and communication technology have increased the complexity of these systems and lead to extended functionalities towards self-driving and more connectivity. Unfortunately, these advances open the door for diverse and newly emerging attacks that hamper the security and, thus, the safety of vehicular systems. In this paper, we contribute to supporting the design of resilient automotive systems. We review and analyze scientific literature on resilience techniques, fault tolerance, and dependability. As a result, we present the REMIND resilience framework providing techniques for attack detection, mitigation, recovery, and resilience endurance. Moreover, we provide guidelines on how the REMIND framework can be used against common security threats and attacks and further discuss the trade-offs when applying these guidelines

Kommunala folkomröstningar i Finland: En översikt av sambandet mellan folkomröstningsresultatet och kommunfullmäktiges agerande under åren 1991–2020

Referendums constitute a political method for increasing the level of democratic legitimacy for a policy decision. An amendment in the Finnish constitution in 1990 enabled the organization of municipal level consultative referendums. The political power remains at the municipal council, irrespective of the referendum result, and municipal councils across Finland have on several occasions chosen to vote against the outcome of the referendums. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of studies focusing on how the outcome of a municipal level referendum affects the political behavior of municipal councils. This study aims at contributing to this line of research by analyzing to what extent the voter turnout and margin of victory following a referendum affects the willingness of municipal councils to act accordingly, or not, to the results. Our results show that when the majority size of the winning side in the referendum is lower, the possibility for the municipal council to act against the majority will increase, while voter turnout does not seem to have any effect. This indicates that when the public opinion becomes sufficiently clear, the congruence between the referendum outcome and the municipal council decision increases, meaning that the result from a consultative referendum in reality transforms into a politically binding political outcome.Folkomröstningar utgör en politisk metod för att öka den demokratiska legitimiteten för ett politiskt beslut. I Finland bidrog en lagändring år 1990 till att det även blev möjligt att arrangera rådgivande folkomröstningar på kommunal nivå. Den politiska makten kvarstår hos kommunfullmäktige, folkomröstningsresultatet till trots, och kommunfullmäktigen runt om i Finland har vid upprepade tillfällen valt att gå emot resultatet från folkomröstningen. Trots detta finns det fortfarande en brist på studier i vilka man har fokuserat på hur resultatet i folkomröstningen inverkar på det efterföljande politiska beslutsfattandet i kommunfullmäktige. Denna studie bidrar till att fylla den forskningsluckan genom att närmare studera i vilken utsträckning valdeltagandet och segermarginalen inverkar på kommunfullmäktigebeslutet att antingen följa eller inte följa resultatet av folkomröstningen. Studiens resultat visar att när segermarginalen är lägre ökar också sannolikheten för att kommunfullmäktige ska rösta emot majoritetsviljan medan valdeltagandet inte verkar att ha någon inverkan på kommunfullmäktigebeslutet. Detta indikerar att när folkviljan blir tillräckligt tydlig, ökar även kongruensen mellan ett folkomröstningsresultat och kommunfullmäktigebeslut, vilket i praktiken innebär att resultatet av en rådgivande folkomröstning vid en klar segermarginal förvandlas till ett politiskt bindande utfall.Folkomröstningar utgör en politisk metod för att öka den demokratiska legitimiteten för ett politiskt beslut. I Finland bidrog en lagändring år 1990 till att det även blev möjligt att arrangera rådgivande folkomröstningar på kommunal nivå. Den politiska makten kvarstår hos kommunfullmäktige, folkomröstningsresultatet till trots, och kommunfullmäktigen runt om i Finland har vid upprepade tillfällen valt att gå emot resultatet från folkomröstningen. Trots detta finns det fortfarande en brist på studier i vilka man har fokuserat på hur resultatet i folkomröstningen inverkar på det efterföljande politiska beslutsfattandet i kommunfullmäktige. Denna studie bidrar till att fylla den forskningsluckan genom att närmare studera i vilken utsträckning valdeltagandet och segermarginalen inverkar på kommunfullmäktigebeslutet att antingen följa eller inte följa resultatet av folkomröstningen. Studiens resultat visar att när segermarginalen är lägre ökar också sannolikheten för att kommunfullmäktige ska rösta emot majoritetsviljan medan valdeltagandet inte verkar att ha någon inverkan på kommunfullmäktigebeslutet. Detta indikerar att när folkviljan blir tillräckligt tydlig, ökar även kongruensen mellan ett folkomröstningsresultat och kommunfullmäktigebeslut, vilket i praktiken innebär att resultatet av en rådgivande folkomröstning vid en klar segermarginal förvandlas till ett politiskt bindande utfall