Embedded Policing and Policy Enforcement based Security in the era of Digital-Physical Convergence for Next-Generation Vehicular Electronics

Abstract: The emergence of intelligent, connected vehicles, containing complex functionality has potential to greatly benefit society by improving safety, security and efficiency of vehicular transportation. Much of this has been enabled by technological advancements in embedded system architectures, which provided opportunities for vehicle manufacturers to implement intelligent vehicle services and consolidate them within a small number of flexible and integrable domain controllers. Thus allowing for increasingly centralised operations consisting of both new and legacy functionalities. While this era of digital-physical convergence of critical and non-critical vehicle services presents advantages in terms of reducing the cost and electronic footprint of vehicular electronics, it has produced significant security and safety challenges. One approach to this research problem is to introduce fail-over mechanisms that can detect unexpected or malicious behaviours, caused by attack or malfunction, and pro-actively respond to control and minimise physical damage or safety hazards. This paper presents a novel embedded policing and policy enforcement platform architecture and the accompanied security modelling approach for next-generation in-vehicle domain controllers. To demonstrate the proposed approach, a connected vehicle case study is conducted. A realistic attack scenarios have been considered to derive security policies and enforced by the proposed security platform to provide security and safety to domain-specific features.