There continues to be massive advancements in modern connected vehicles and with these advancements, connectivity continues to rapidly become more integral to the way these vehicles are designed and operated.
Vehicle connectivity was originally introduced for the purpose of providing software updates to the vehicle’s main system software, and we have seen the adoption of Over The Air updates (OTA) become mainstream with most OEMs. The exploitation of this connectivity is far more reaching than just basic software updates. In the latest vehicles it is possible to update software not just on the main vehicle systems, but to potentially update embedded software in all smart ECUs within the vehicle.
Only using the connectivity to push data to the vehicle is not making full use of the potential of this increased connectivity. Being able to collect vehicle data for offline analysis and processing also brings huge benefits to the use of this technology.
Using these technologies brings not only great advantages and ease of use, but it also provides an extremely attractive threat landscape for modern cyber attackers – which must be appropriately secured to guard against such threats.
The technology described in this paper provides a comprehensive solution to the problems of vehicle intrusion and in-life threat management - using hardware monitors to provide low-latency and reliable threat detection.