Automotive IT-security as a challenge: Basic attacks from the black box perspective on the example of privacy threats

Abstract

Since automotive IT is becoming more and more powerful, the IT-security in this domain is an evolving area of research. In this paper we focus on the relevance of the black box perspective in the context of threat analyses for automotive IT systems and discuss typical starting points and implications of respective attacks. We put a special focus on potential privacy issues, which we expect to be of increasing relevance in future automotive systems. To motivate appropriate provision for privacy protection in future cars we discuss potential scenarios of privacy violations. To underline the relevance even today, we further present a novel attack on a recent gateway ECU enabling an attacker to sniff arbitrary internal communication even beyond subnetwork borders. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.