Biblio

The Robot Operating System (ROS) are being deployed for multiple life critical activities such as self-driving cars, drones, and industries. However, the security has been persistently neglected, especially the image flows incoming from camera robots. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of robot cameras using ROS. We points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over the flows incoming from the robot cameras. Furthermore, we propose an intrusion detection system to detect abnormal flows. Our defense approach is based on images comparisons and unsupervised anomaly detection method. We experiment our approach on robot cameras embedded on a self-driving car.

Modern automotive architectures are complex and often comprise of hundreds of electronic control units (ECUs). These ECUs provide diverse services including infotainment, telematics, diagnostics, advanced driving assistance, and many others. The availability of such services is mainly attained by the increasing connectivity with the external world, thus expanding the attack surface. In recent years, automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and ECU suppliers have become cautious of cyber attacks and have begun fortifying the most vulnerable systems, with hardware-based security modules that enable sandboxing, secure boot, secure software updates and end-to-end message authentication. Nevertheless, insecure legacy ECUs are still in-use in modern vehicles due to price and design complexity issues. Legacy ECUs depend on simple microcontrollers, that lack any kind of hardware-based security. This makes it essential to bridge the gap between modern and legacy ECUs through software-based security by which cyber attacks can be mitigated, thus enhancing the security of vehicles. This paper provides one more step towards highly secure vehicles by introducing a lightweight software- based security framework which provides legacy ECUs with software-based virtualization and protection features along with custom security services. We discuss the motivation for pure software-based approaches, explore the various requirements and advantages obtained, and give an initial insight of the design rationale. Furthermore, we provide a proof of concept implementation and evaluation with a demonstrative use case illustrating the importance of such framework in delivering new diagnostics security services to legacy ECUs.

Vehicles are becoming increasingly connected to the outside world. We can connect our devices to the vehicle's infotainment system and internet is being added as a functionality. Therefore, security is a major concern as the attack surface has become much larger than before. Consequently, attackers are creating malware that can infect vehicles and perform life-threatening activities. For example, a malware can compromise vehicle ECUs and cause unexpected consequences. Hence, ensuring the security of connected vehicle software and networks is extremely important to gain consumer confidence and foster the growth of this emerging market. In this paper, we propose a characterization of vehicle malware and a security architecture to protect vehicle from these malware. The architecture uses multiple computational platforms and makes use of the virtualization technique to limit the attack surface. There is a real-time operating system to control critical vehicle functionalities and multiple other operating systems for non-critical functionalities (infotainment, telematics, etc.). The security architecture also describes groups of components for the operating systems to prevent malicious activities and perform policing (monitor, detect, and control). We believe this work will help automakers guard their systems against malware and provide a clear guideline for future research.

There is a need for new tools and techniques to aid automotive engineers performing cybersecurity testing on connected car systems. This is in order to support the principle of secure-by-design. Our research has produced a method to construct useful automotive security tooling and tests. It has been used to implement Controller Area Network (CAN) fuzz testing (a dynamic security test) via a prototype CAN fuzzer. The black-box fuzz testing of a laboratory vehicle's display ECU demonstrates the value of a fuzzer in the automotive field, revealing bugs in the ECU software, and weaknesses in the vehicle's systems design.

Security is a critical issue for new car generation targeting intelligent transportation systems (ITS), involving autonomous and connected vehicles. In this work we designed a low cost CAN probe and defined analysis tools in order to build attack scenarios. We reuse some threats identified by a previous work. Future researches will address new security protocols.

With emerging smart automotive technologies, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and software-dominated enhancements for enjoyable driving and advanced driver assistance systems, the complexity of providing guarantees in terms of security, trust, and privacy in a modern cyber-enabled automotive system is significantly elevated. New threat models emerge that require efficient system-level countermeasures. This article introduces synergies between on- and off-chip networking techniques to ensure secure execution environments for electronic control units. The proposed mechanisms consist of hardware firewalling and on-chip network physical isolation, whose mechanisms are combined with system-wide cryptographic techniques in automotive controller area network (CAN)-bus communications to provide authentication and confidentiality.

In most produced modern vehicles, Passive Keyless Entry and Start System (PKES), a newer form of an entry access system, is becoming more and more popular. The PKES system allows the consumer to enter within a certain range and have the vehicle's doors unlock automatically without pressing any buttons on the key. This technology increases the overall convenience to the consumer; however, it is vulnerable to attacks known as relay and amplified relay attacks. A relay attack consists of placing a device near the vehicle and a device near the key to relay the signal between the key and the vehicle. On the other hand, an amplified relay attack uses only a singular amplifier to increase the range of the vehicle sensors to reach the key. By exploiting these two different vulnerabilities within the PKES system, an attacker can gain unauthorized access to the vehicle, leading to damage or even stolen property. To minimize both vulnerabilities, we propose a coordinate tracing system with an additional Bluetooth communication channel. The coordinate tracing system, or PKES Forcefield, traces the authorized key's longitude and latitude in real time using two proposed algorithms, known as the Key Bearing algorithm and the Longitude and Latitude Key (LLK) algorithm. To further add security, a Bluetooth communication channel will be implemented. With an additional channel established, a second frequency can be traced within a secondary PKES Forcefield. The LLK Algorithm computes both locations of frequencies and analyzes the results to form a pattern. Furthermore, the PKES Forcefield movement-tracing allows a vehicle to understand when an attacker attempts to transmit an unauthenticated signal and blocks any signal from being amplified over a fixed range.

Modern vehicles may contain a considerable number of ECUs (Electronic Control Units) which are connected through various means of communication, with the CAN (Controller Area Network) protocol being the most widely used. However, several vulnerabilities such as the lack of authentication and the lack of data encryption have been pointed out by several authors, which ultimately render vehicles unsafe to their users and surroundings. Moreover, the lack of security in modern automobiles has been studied and analyzed by other researchers as well as several reports about modern car hacking have (already) been published. The contribution of this work aimed to analyze and test the level of security and how resilient is the CAN protocol by taking a BMW E90 (3-series) instrument cluster as a sample for a proof of concept study. This investigation was carried out by building and developing a rogue device using cheap commercially available components while being connected to the same CAN-Bus as a man in the middle device in order to send spoofed messages to the instrument cluster.

Modern vehicles are opening up, with wireless interfaces such as Bluetooth integrated in order to enable comfort and safety features. Furthermore a plethora of aftermarket devices introduce additional connectivity which contributes to the driving experience. This connectivity opens the vehicle to potentially malicious attacks, which could have negative consequences with regards to safety. In this paper, we survey vehicles with Bluetooth connectivity from a threat intelligence perspective to gain insight into conditions during real world driving. We do this in two ways: firstly, by examining Bluetooth implementation in vehicles and gathering information from inside the cabin, and secondly, using war-nibbling (general monitoring and scanning for nearby devices). We find that as the vehicle age decreases, the security (relatively speaking) of the Bluetooth implementation increases, but that there is still some technological lag with regards to Bluetooth implementation in vehicles. We also find that a large proportion of vehicles and aftermarket devices still use legacy pairing (and are therefore more insecure), and that these vehicles remain visible for sufficient time to mount an attack (assuming some premeditation and preparation). We demonstrate a real-world threat scenario as an example of the latter. Finally, we provide some recommendations on how the security risks we discover could be mitigated.

In this paper, we propose SAFE (Security Aware FlexRay scheduling Engine), to provide a problem definition and a design framework for FlexRay static segment schedule to address the new challenge on security. From a high level specification of the application, the architecture and communication middleware are synthesized to satisfy security requirements, in addition to extensibility, costs, and end-to-end latencies. The proposed design process is applied to two industrial case studies consisting of a set of active safety functions and an X-by-wire system respectively.