A Tutorial on Moving Target Defense Approaches Within Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems

Bradley Potteiger,Long Cheng,Zhenkai Zhang,Xenofon Koutsoukos

doi:10.3389/ffutr.2021.792573

Abstract

Moving Target Defenses (MTD) have become a popular and emerging defense strategy for the protection of traditional information technology systems. By their very nature, MTD strategies are designed to protect against adversary reconnaissance efforts on static platforms, essentially sitting back and having unlimited time to identify, craft, execute, and scale an exploit. With the rapid adoption of distributed automotive Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) ranging from self driving cars, to connected transportation infrastructure, it is becoming more apparent that third party supply chains, increased remote communication interfaces, and legacy software stacks are making the traditionally designed standalone systems become more susceptible to safety-critical cyber-attacks. MTD strategies within the automotive CPS domain have to delicately balance the tradeoff between security and real time predictability, maintaining the safety constraints of the systems. In this paper, we explore the various MTD strategies presented within the literature while discussing potential applicability and strategies sufficient for the automotive CPS domain.

Highlights

Over the past decade, increasing numbers of electronic control units (ECUs) that communicate via different types of communication buses like controller area network (CAN), FlexRay, and automotive Ethernet have been assembled inside automobiles to provide intelligent services and safety to users (Shane et al, 2015; Wu et al, 2020)
We present a comprehensive overview of the automotive Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) domain, including the architectures, security challenges, and potential opportunities
The static nature of current networks makes reconnaissance easy, allowing for attackers to maintain privileged access for a long time once a vulnerability is discovered. This is especially significant as the internet task force has declared a number of attacks that can be implemented with an attacker correctly guessing a combination of transmission control protocol (TCP) attributes including the protocol, source address, destination address, source port, and destination port (Larsen and Gont, 2011)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade, increasing numbers of electronic control units (ECUs) that communicate via different types of communication buses like controller area network (CAN), FlexRay, and automotive Ethernet have been assembled inside automobiles to provide intelligent services and safety to users (Shane et al, 2015; Wu et al, 2020). This is especially significant as the internet task force has declared a number of attacks that can be implemented with an attacker correctly guessing a combination of transmission control protocol (TCP) attributes including the protocol, source address, destination address, source port, and destination port (Larsen and Gont, 2011) This leaves networks open to attacks from worms, especially hitlist worms who have preprogrammed lists of target IP addresses and entry ports to use for infection and spreading (Antonatos et al, 2007) the concept of network randomization seeks to continuously modify various network attributes such as addresses, ports, protocols, and logical network topology to deter the attacker from gaining relevant information necessary to conduct network borne attacks (Okhravi et al, 2014). By changing these network features, the attacker exploration space is increased, reducing the probability of a successful attack, and preventing an attacker from relying on previous gathered reconnaissance information

Findings

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION