Design and Evaluation of a Reconfigurable ECU Architecture for Secure and Dependable Automotive CPS

Abstract

The next generation of automobiles integrate a multitude of electronic control units (ECUs) to implement various automotive control and infotainment applications. However, recent works have demonstrated that these pervasively computerized modern automobiles are susceptible to security attacks that could compromise the physical safety of the driver and/or passengers. In this paper, we propose a novel ECU architecture for automotive cyber-physical systems (CPS) that simultaneously integrates both security and dependability primitives in the design with negligible performance, energy, and resources overhead. We implement our proposed ECU architecture on Xilinx Automotive (XA) Spartan-6 FPGA. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architecture using a steer-by-wire (SBW) application over controller area network (CAN) with flexible data rate (CAN FD) as a case study. We also optimize and implement a prior secure and dependable automotive work on NXP quad-core iMX6Q SABRE automotive board. We quantify the performance, energy, and error resilience of our proposed architecture for the SBW case study. Results reveal that our proposed architecture can attain a speedup of 47.9× while consuming 2.4× lesser energy than the optimized SABRE board implementation of security and dependability primitives. We further perform a comparative analysis of prior designs and the proposed ECU architecture for different in-vehicle networks, viz., CAN, CAN FD, and FlexRay. Results verify the feasibility as well as the superiority of the proposed ECU over other prior designs in terms of response time, energy efficiency, and error resilience.

Security and Privacy Issues in Intelligent Transportation Systems: Classification and Challenges

“…Besides smart vehicles communicating with one another, the components within vehicle, such as electronic control units (ECUs), need to communicate with each other to implement various distributed control functions. This in-vehicle communication is accomplished through in-vehicle networks, such as Controller Area Network (CAN), CAN with Flexible Data-Rate (CAN FD), and FlexRay [15]. Previous research has shown that in-vehicle networks are susceptible to security attacks where an adversary can remotely control the vehicle while completely ignoring the driver's input [16].…”

“…The secure storage of secret keys presents challenges. To minimize potential exploits, secret keys can be stored in tamper-resistant memories, however, however, a multitude of attack vectors, such as side-channel attacks, reverse engineering, fault injection attacks, microprobing, and software attacks have been devised for appraisal, cloning, and extraction of secret keys stored in nonvolatile memory [15]. Public key cryptography can be used for secure generation of secret keys.…”

“…Sehgal et al [18] have explored requirements of IP-based network management protocols for use in resource constrained devices. Finally, integration of security primitives in hardware architecture can also help in meeting security requirements of devices with limited resources while adhering to the real-time requirements of ITS agents [15].…”

“…of the ITS devices and components are resource constrained, which limits the incorporation of stronger security protocols. Works by Poudel et al[15][77][78] attempts to address this issue by introducing novel ECU architectures for modern automobiles. In these works,…”

Design and Validation of Low-Power Secure and Dependable Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem

“…During the reconfiguration process, the spare module handles the job of the faulty module. We refer to this fault-tolerant mechanism as fault tolerance using self-reconfiguration in the DMR system (FT-SR-DMR) [44].…”