Rapid advances of connected and autonomous vehicle technology have led to an increase in cyber-attacks. This in turn has driven the development of the ISO 21434 standard aimed at supporting the management of cybersecurity risks in the automotive industry. There is, however, a disconnect between the standard and the currently applied model-based development approaches that are increasingly applied for systems and software development. In this paper, we present tool support created for model-based automotive cybersecurity engineering. This tool is built upon the existing automotive systems development language, EAST-ADL, with extensions to address security in accordance with the ISO 21434 standard covering modeling support, calculation of security-related metrics such as impact, risk, and attack feasibility, and generation of ISO 21434 compliant security threat reports. Meeting the requirements of cybersecurity engineeering according to ISO 21434 are demonstrated with two examples.
Development of reliable systems requires that safety and security concerns are acknowledged during system development. Adding them afterwards is risky as many concerns are missed if not elicited together with the system requirements. Unfortunately, languages for systems engineering, like SysML, typically ignore security and safety forcing development teams to split the work into different formats, languages and tools without easy collaboration, with limited traceability, separate versioning and restricted use of automation that tools can provide. We present a model-based approach targeting automotive that integrates safety and security aspects with other system development practices. This is achieved via a comprehensive domain-specific modeling language that is extendable by language users. We demonstrate this approach with practical examples on how security and safety concerns are recognized along with traditional system design and analysis phases.
Security cannot be implemented into a system retrospectively without considerable effort, so security must be taken into consideration already at the beginning of the system development. The engineering of automotive software is by no means an exception to this rule. For addressing automotive security, the AUTOSAR and EAST-ADL standards for domain-specific system and component modeling provide the central foundation as a start. The EASTADL extension SAM enables fully integrated security modeling for traditional feature-targeted attacks. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of cyber-attacks has increased tremendously and of these, about 98 percent are based on social engineering attacks. These social engineering attacks exploit vulnerabilities in human behaviors, rather than vulnerabilities in a system, to inflict damage. And these social engineering attacks also play a relevant but nonetheless regularly neglected role for automotive software. The contribution of this paper is a novel modeling concept for social engineering attacks and their criticality assessment integrated into a general automotive software security modeling approach. This makes it possible to relate social engineering exploits with feature-related attacks. To elevate the practical usage, we implemented an integration of this concept into the established, domain-specific modeling tool MetaEdit+. The tool support enables collaboration between stakeholders, calculates vulnerability scores, and enables the specification of security objectives and measures to eliminate vulnerabilities.
The proliferation of connected and autonomous vehicle technologies has significantly increased cybersecurity risks. Modern vehicles, as complex and networked computer systems, require comprehensive protection against malicious external attacks, much like conventional computers. Addressing these challenges requires robust tools that align established automotive model-based development approaches with the ISO/SAE 21434 standard for automotive cybersecurity, which became mandatory following its publication in 2021. Building on prior research, this paper introduces key innovations in the conceptual framework and the tool support that integrate seamlessly into existing automotive development methodologies. These advancements are rooted in extensions to the Security Abstraction Model (SAM) informed by the ISO/SAE 21434 standard. Notably, SAM now incorporates advanced methods for score calculation, including an attack potential-based approach for assessing attack feasibility and the computation of risk scores using risk matrices. Usability improvements are also a contribution, achieved through the introduction of BPMN-style (Business Process Model and Notation) diagrams tailored for the accessible visualization of otherwise complex security models. These diagrams make multifaceted attack trees easier to interpret, enabling managers and other non-technical stakeholders to intuitively understand security vulnerabilities and make informed decisions.
Additionally, the tool supports updated metrics for impact and risk analysis, demonstrated through practical applications involving automotive subsystems such as braking. These examples illustrate improved traceability between SAM and functional design, ensuring that cybersecurity requirements are effectively integrated into the broader development lifecycle.