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The increasing use of software and connectivity in modern vehicles has made cybersecurity an important issue in the automotive industry. ISO 21434 is a standard for automotive cybersecurity engineering that provides guidelines for the development and validation of secure automotive systems. For effective implementation and practical use of ISO 21434, it must be incorporated into existing automotive industry development workflows.
In this paper, we investigate the practical applicability of ISO 21434 in the context of the Security Abstraction Model (SAM), a security modeling approach for the domain-specific modeling language EAST-ADL, and provide insights into the benefits and consequences of this approach. In doing so, we describe the methodological opportunities of integrating ISO 21434 into SAM on the one hand and present a case study illustrating the application of this integrated approach in the development of a secure automotive system on the other hand. Our results suggest that the integration of ISO 21434 into SAM better supports automotive system security in the early development phases and makes it transparent to a wide range of stakeholders. At the same time, it becomes clear that a representation of the interrelationships in the form of a metamodel, in contrast to ISO 21434 in which these are only described textually, significantly improves conceptual understanding and ultimately enables pragmatic usability in industrial development.
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.
The development quality for the control software for autonomous vehicles is rapidly progressing, so that the control units in the field generally perform very reliably. Nevertheless, fatal misjudgments occasionally occur putting people at risk: such as the recent accident in which a Tesla vehicle in Autopilot mode rammed a police vehicle. Since the object recognition software which is a part of the control software is based on machine learning (ML) algorithms at its core, one can distinguish a training phase from a deployment phase of the software. In this paper we investigate to what extent the deployment phase has an impact on the robustness and reliability of the software; because just as traditional, software based on ML degrades with time. A widely known effect is the so-called concept drift: in this case, one finds that the deployment conditions in the field have changed and the software, based on the outdated training data, no longer responds adequately to the current field situation. In a previous research paper, we developed the SafeML approach with colleagues from the University of Hull, where datasets are compared for their statistical distance measures. In doing so, we detected that for simple, benchmark data, the statistical distance correlates with the classification accuracy in the field. The contribution of this paper is to analyze the applicability of the SafeML approach to complex, multidimensional data used in autonomous driving. In our analysis, we found that the SafeML approach can be used for this data as well. In practice, this would mean that a vehicle could constantly check itself and detect concept drift situation early.
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.
