On the assessment of automotive threats and related intrusion detection systems.
Since the early 2000’ the automotive environment has seen great development, the majority of which has been focused on electronics rather than mechanics and material designs. We reached a point where a vehicle cannot be considered only as a mechanical instrument but necessarily also as a network of connected devices. In the last years some of these devices have become so powerful that they can compete in performances with many personal computers, and have been in the meantime connected to the outside world through a plethora of different wireless and wired technologies. Although the increase in electronics and informatics strongly pushes towards higher safety and higher comfort in vehicles, it also brings its own negative effects, and in particular it lowers the intrinsic security of a highly computerized vehicle. In fact, many attacks towards vehicles have been proven possible in the last ten years that raise the question of how to secure such computers on wheels.
The topic of automotive security is obviously being considered by automotive manufacturers, but it is evident how the majority of solutions that are being currently applied are mainly adaptations of more traditional solutions to a new framework rather than specifically tailored solutions designed from scratch for the automotive environment.
In this work we analyze the automotive threat model, highlighting its distinctive aspects: CAN, the on-board embedded control systems, and the nomadic behavior of vehicles. For each of these distinctive aspects we then proceed to comprehend their peculiarities, in order to use them to design tailored intrusion detection systems to mitigate attacks.
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