Security Concerns for Automotive Communication and Software Architecture

Cyber security concerns in the automotive industry have been constantly increasing as automobiles are more computerized and networked. Recent successful hacks of modern vehicles demonstrate the big security concerns for automotive systems. However it is still very hard and even impossible to predict what kinds of security issues will happen. In this paper, we present the automotive security concerns from several different and fundamental points of view: communication, system and software architecture. We first discuss different security concerns related to communication media and protocols, such as CAN bus and Ethernet. We then consider concerns for automotive architecture: general system architecture and AUTOSAR-based architecture. For each view, we summarize the open questions and challenges in the design of secured automotive systems. In spite of addressing security concerns with very specific solutions, we promote a system-level security design approach considering both communication and software architecture. This requires to consider the security issues and design from an architecture and systems engineering points of view.