Driving Automotive Middleware Towards a Secure IP-based Future

Today’s vehicle has become a very complex good,offering performance and reliability thanks to a sophisticatednetwork of Electronic Control Units. Each year car makersdevelop new automotive features for use inside and outside ofthe car. But improving this infrastructure each time adds newcosts and overhead to the system. A promising solution resides inthe use of Internet Protocol (IP) standards for both on-board andvehicle-to-X communications. With IP over Ethernet, bandwidthand system performance will increase, but so will the securityrisks for both passenger safety and vehicle system integrity. IPis a well-known and attack-prone technology and the car aneasy prey. Communication encryption and static access controlswon’t be sufficient; more suitable and complex security protocolsand infrastructures are required. In this paper we present anew middleware architecture for on-board security, allowingestablishment of internal and external secure communicationchannels and secure runtime environment for automotive appli-cations. The modularization of our architecture allows protocolindependency and adaptability in terms of performance andsecurity for automotive use cases.