AUTOSARLang: Threat Modeling and Attack Simulation for Vehicle Cybersecurity

Abstract: The rapid growth and development of the Information and Communications Technology attract many industries including the automotive industry. Since the last four decades, the automotive engineering has been impacted by the Information Technology. Nowadays, modern vehicles are being designed with up to hundreds of electronic control units (ECUs) and be able to communicate with other vehicles, infrastructure, and other things via wireless networks and sensors. For such in-vehicle networks, serial bus systems like CAN bus, LIN bus, FlexRay, and MOST are standardized. Parallel to this, the automotive industry vendors designed and standardized automotive open systems architecture (AUTOSAR) software platform. AUTOSAR has two main standards - the classical platform and adaptive platform. The classical platform (CP) is designed for the current embedded ECUs, whereas the adaptive platform (AP) is being designed for the future intelligent ECUs. The intelligent AP ECU constitute many multi-processing processors and Ethernet to realize the future autonomous vehicles.On the other hand, automotive industries shall ensure “safety first” in their design and regard it as part of their market feature. Directly or indirectly, the safety of the modern connected vehicles is related to their cybersecurity. Today, cybersecurity professionals are conducting researches to bring remarkable solutions to the sophisticated cyberattacks. One approach of cybersecurity solution is to make a cyber threat modeling and attack simulations. Example, meta-attack-language (MAL) is a threat modeling and attack simulation language, which is designed to make domain-specific threat analysis.In this study, potential assets of an automotive vehicle with AP ECUs are identified. Then, threats of each identified asset are collected from different literature. With both inputs, a cyber threat model is written using MAL. Finally, validation of the model is made with a simulation language. Consequently, modern vehicle with AP ECUs is modeled and simulated.This study contributes four important things - list of potential assets that AP running vehicle constitutes, collected list of threats of the identified assets, validated cyber threat model, and simulation test cases for each potential attack paths in the model.