Security and Protection Aspects of Automotive Architectures for External Influences

Architectures of automotive systems and subsystems are becoming complex owing to growing system requirements which are getting fulfilled by contemporary technologies. Having envisioned these complexities, standardization of system architectures have come into being. These standardizations facilitate simpler ways to build such complex systems in a progressive manner. However, standardization has not been addressing, explicitly, mechanisms to incorporate protection and security aspects into the system being built. Protection and security are essential for safety critical systems of which automotive systems are classic examples. Further, complex automotive systems, invariably, involve integrations of different technologies and such integrations are potential sources for security related issues such as IT related securities, electrical disturbances, etc. An attempt is made in this paper to propose architectural enhancements which incorporate protection and security aspects to automotive system architectures. These enhancements are expected to, eventually, become integral parts of the standardization.