Implicit Message Integrity Provision : In Heterogeneous Vehicular Systems

Abstract: Vehicles on the road today are complex multi-node computer networks. Security has always been a critical issue in the automotive computing industry. It is becoming even more crucial with the advent of autonomous vehicles and driver assistant technology. There is potential for attackers to control vehicles maliciously. Traditionally Original Equipment Manufacturers have relied on physical security and a firewall to secure vehicles but with network connected and autonomous capable vehicles this is not enough. The concept of defence in depth is required. This means not trusting that internal traffic inside the firewall is benign. Each node in the vehicles network should be able to verify the authenticity and validity of communications it receives from other nodes. Implementation of the crypto-graphic systems for doing this is error prone. Therefore a key issue in the thesis is reducing the attack surface by developing these checks in the autonomous vehicle stack in a scalable way so the programmer does not have to be aware of this security layer on a day-to-day basis nor re-implement it for each node in these heterogeneous systems. Although message integrity and authenticity verification have been studied and implemented in many fields, the area of heterogeneous autonomous systems present unique research challenges. There are tight performance constraints due to the real time requirements for vehicle control systems and data publishing rates. It is an open question if this approach can achieve performance within the bounds required for a reliable autonomous vehicle. Additionally the security benefit of scalably automatically generating the message integrity verification code across all of the nodes in a heterogeneous system would help the field quantify the defect reduction and security benefit of this kind of code generation on complex software systems.