Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 18, numbers 1 and 2, 2025 // View article

Towards a Trust Management Approach Encompassing Stakeholders for the Automotive Ecosystem

Authors:
Marco Michl
Hans-Joachim Hof

Keywords: automotive; ecosystem; trust; authorization; stakeholder; formalization.

Abstract:
The rise of connected services in modern vehicles, combined with the target of software-defined vehicles, makes new approaches to securing the automotive ecosystem necessary. One of these approaches is implementing computational trust models within vehicles to secure interactions in a way inspired by the intuitive concept of trust. Involved stakeholders and their relations are essential to creating a system representing trust. We identified relevant stakeholder groups involved in the communication of modern cars. We characterized them based on their lifecycle phase, the user agents and devices used to communicate, and their relations and roles. Furthermore, we describe the necessity for trust in the automotive ecosystem, the connection between trust and authorization, and the trust relations between the stakeholders. A formalization approach for the gathered knowledge about stakeholders and their characteristics is presented, utilizing a set-theory-based framework to review the definition of trust relations between stakeholders compared to proposed trust management systems. This approach shows that stakeholders in the automotive domain mainly gain their trust through their roles rather than their behavior. The difference between stakeholders and other entities is shown using the introduced framework. The provided stakeholder analysis, their roles in the automotive environment, and the formalization approach to linking stakeholders to trustworthy decisions are thus a basis for designing general trust management systems for the automotive ecosystem that cover multiple entity types.

Pages: 48 to 60

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2025. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2025

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636