Threat Analysis on Vehicle Computer Systems

Abstract: Vehicles have been around in our society for over a century, until recently they have been standalone systems. With increased amounts of initiatives to inter-network vehicles to avoid accidents and reduce environmental impact the view of a vehicle as a standalone system needs to be reconsidered. Networking and cooperation between vehicles requires that all systems and the information therein are trustworthy. Faulty or malicious vehicle systems are thus not limited to only affecting a single vehicle but also the entire network. The detection of anomalous behavior in a vehicle computer system is therefore of importance. To improve the vehicle systems we strive to achieve security awareness within the vehicle computer system. As a first step we will identify threats toward the vehicle computer system and what has been done to address them. We perform a threat analysis consisting of fault trees and misuse cases to identify the threats. The fault trees provide away to connect the threats found with vehicle stakeholders' goals. The connection between stakeholder goals and threat highlights the need for threat mitigation. Several research initiatives are discussed to find out what has been done to address the identified threats and to find the state of the research for security in vehicle computer system. Lastly, an error model for the Controller Area Network (CAN) is proposed to model the consequences of threats applied to the CAN bus.