Secure Wireless Automotive Software Updates Using Blockchains: A Proof of Concept

Abstract

Future smart vehicles will employ automotive over-the-air updates to update the soft ware in the embedded electronic control units. The update process can affect the safety of the involved users, thus requires a comprehensive and elaborate security architecture ensuring the confidentiality and the integrity of the exchanged data, as well as protecting the privacy of the involved users. In this paper, we propose an automotive security architecture employing Blockchain to tackle the implicated security and privacy challenges. We describe our proof-of-concept implementation of a Blockchain-based software update system, use it to show the applicability of our architecture for automotive systems, and evaluate different aspects of our architecture.