Attack Surface and Vulnerability Assessment of Automotive Electronic Control Units

Martin Salfer, Claudia Eckert

2015

Abstract

Modern vehicles are controlled by an on-board network of ECUs (Electronic Control Units), which are specially designed computers that contain tightly tailored and customized software. Especially the trends for ECU connectivity and for semi-autonomous driver assistance functions may have an impact on passenger safety and require thorough security assessments, yet the ECU divergence strains those assessments. We therefore propose an easily automated, quantitative, probabilistic method and metric based on ECU development data and software flash images for the attack surface and vulnerability assessment automation. Our method and metric is designed for the integration into an (iterative) engineering process and the facilitation of code reviews and other security assessments, such as penetration tests. The automotive attack surface comprises especially internal communication interfaces, including diagnosis protocols, external and user-accessible interfaces, such as USB sockets, as well as low-level hardware interfaces. Some exemplary indicators for the vulnerability are access restrictions, casing tamper-resistance, code size, previously found vulnerabilities; strictness of compilers, frameworks and application binary interfaces; conducted security audits and deployed exploit mitigation techniques. This paper’s main contributions are I) a method and a metric for collecting attack surface and predicting the engineering effort for a code injection exploit from ECU development data, II) an application of our metric and method on an example ECU and III) an integration into our graph-based security assessment.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Salfer M. and Eckert C. (2015). Attack Surface and Vulnerability Assessment of Automotive Electronic Control Units.In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2015) ISBN 978-989-758-117-5, pages 317-326. DOI: 10.5220/0005550003170326

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt15,
author={Martin Salfer and Claudia Eckert},
title={Attack Surface and Vulnerability Assessment of Automotive Electronic Control Units},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2015)},
year={2015},
pages={317-326},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005550003170326},
isbn={978-989-758-117-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2015)
TI - Attack Surface and Vulnerability Assessment of Automotive Electronic Control Units
SN - 978-989-758-117-5
AU - Salfer M.
AU - Eckert C.
PY - 2015
SP - 317
EP - 326
DO - 10.5220/0005550003170326