Analyses of Secure Automotive Communication Protocols and Their Impact on Vehicles Life-Cycle

Abstract

Modern vehicles are complex cyber physical systems where communication protocols designed for physically isolated networks are now employed to connect Internet-enabled devices. This unforeseen increase in connectivity creates novel attack surfaces, and exposes safety-critical functions of the vehicle to cyber attacks. As standard security solutions are not applicable to vehicles due to resource constraints and compatibility issues, research is proposing tailored approaches to cope with existing systems and to design next generations vehicles. In this paper we focus on solutions based on cryptographic protocols to protect in-vehicle communications and prevent unauthorized manipulation of the vehicle behaviors. Existing proposals consider vehicles as monolithic systems and evaluate performance and costs of the proposed solutions without considering the complex life-cycle of automotive components and the multifaceted automotive ecosystem that includes a large number of actors. The main contribution of this paper is a study of the impact of security solutions by considering vehicles life-cycle. We model existing proposals and highlight their impacts on vehicles production and maintenance operations by taking into consideration interactions among multiple players. Finally, we give insights on the requirements of architectures for secure intra-vehicular protocols.