An approach for building security resilience in AUTOSAR based safety critical systems

Abstract

AUTOSAR, a worldwide development partnership among automotive parties to establish an open and standardized software architecture for electronic control units (ECUs), has seen great success in recent years by being widely adopted in deeply embedded automotive ECUs. Increasing the security resilience of AUTOSAR based systems is a crucial step in securing safety critical automotive systems. We study AUTOSAR safety mechanisms and demonstrate how they can be used as attack vectors to degrade the vehicle safety.We show the need to harmonize the fail-safe response with the secure state of the system. And we evaluate the overlap in the properties of safety mechanisms with security objectives to highlight methods for hardening automotive systems security.