Biblio

Automobiles provide comfort and mobility to owners. While they make life more meaningful they also pose challenges and risks in their safety and security mechanisms. Some modern automobiles are equipped with anti-theft systems and enhanced safety measures to safeguard its drivers. But at times, these mechanisms for safety and secured operation of automobiles are insufficient due to various mechanisms used by intruders and car thieves to defeat them. Drunk drivers cause accidents on our roads and thus the need to safeguard the driver when he is intoxicated and render the car to be incapable of being driven. These issues merit an integrated approach to safety and security of automobiles. In the light of these challenges, an integrated microcontroller-based hardware and software system for safety and security of automobiles to be fixed into existing vehicle architecture, was designed, developed and deployed. The system submodules are: (1) Two-step ignition for automobiles, namely: (a) biometric ignition and (b) alcohol detection with engine control, (2) Global Positioning System (GPS) based vehicle tracking and (3) Multisensor-based fire detection using neuro-fuzzy logic. All submodules of the system were implemented using one microcontroller, the Arduino Mega 2560, as the central control unit. The microcontroller was programmed using C++11. The developed system performed quite well with the tests performed on it. Given the right conditions, the alcohol detection subsystem operated with a 92% efficiency. The biometric ignition subsystem operated with about 80% efficiency. The fire detection subsystem operated with a 95% efficiency in locations registered with the neuro-fuzzy system. The vehicle tracking subsystem operated with an efficiency of 90%.

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.