Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 10, numbers 1 and 2, 2017 // View article

Plausibility Checks in Electronic Control Units to Enhance Safety and Security

Authors:
Martin Ring
Reiner Kriesten
Frank Kargl

Keywords: Automotive Security; Vehicular Attacks; Plausibility Checks.

Abstract:
Modern vehicles include a large number of Electronic Control Units interconnected by different bus systems. Attacks on these critical infrastructure elements have increased significantly over the last years, particularly since remote exploitation is possible due to increased wireless connectivity from the cars to the outside world. Many of these attacks exploit available standard communication protocols and diagnostic services implemented in cars that are often mandatory. Such services allow, for example, the activation of headlights or the turning of the steering wheel via the parking assist functionality. These services must be sufficiently secure, such that they can only be triggered when it is safe to do so, e. g., when the car is parked or driving at low speed. The validation mechanisms to determine a safe state are mainly plausibility checks, which currently often only utilize the vehicle speed, reported via the Controller Area Network bus, as an input parameter. In this paper, we motivate the need to base plausibility checks on other input values, which may be more authentic and reliable. Specifically, we propose the use of immanent signals for plausibility checks, i. e., signals derived from hard-wired sensors, which are harder to manipulate. In this paper, we propose some specific implementations of plausibility checks with immanent signals and argue how they would protect from current attacks on cars found in literature, we also discuss how the same idea may be applied to other areas, such as Industrial Control Systems.

Pages: 126 to 133

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2017. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2017

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636