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Combatting the modification of automotive control systems is a current and future challenge for OEMs and suppliers. ‘Chip-tuning’ is a manifestation of manipulation of a vehicle's original setup and calibration. With the increase in automotive functions implemented in software and corresponding business models, chip tuning will become a major concern. Recognizing and reporting of tuned control units in a vehicle is required for technical as well as legal reasons. This work approaches the problem by capturing the behavior of relevant control units within a machine learning system called a recognition module. The recognition module continuously monitors vehicle's sensor data. It comprises a set of classifiers that have been trained on the intended behavior of a control unit before the vehicle is delivered. When the vehicle is on the road, the recognition module uses the classifier together with current data to ascertain that the behavior of the vehicle is as intended.

The need for vehicular data security and privacy protection is already enormous and increases even further. Prominent application areas are for instance theft protection, anti-counterfeiting, secure data storage and secure communication inside the vehicle and from the vehicle to the outside world. However, most of the vehicular security and privacy protection solutions involve modern cryptography and require availability of cryptographic keys in the vehicle and in related backend infrastructure. A central aspect for ensuring this availability and a controlled usage of such cryptographic keys is a secure key management, which affects the whole lifecycle of the key, from creation and distribution, usage, backup and update up to key deactivation.

Data security was introduced to vehicles in the 1980's with the electronic theft protection system. Since then data security was also implemented in further electronic systems of vehicles, including theft protection for electronic control units, protection of mileage counter integrity, protection against software manipulation (secure flashing), and secure wireless on-board diagnoses (e.g. via Bluetooth). Vehicles include more and more electronic systems and open communication channels based on public standards, making them vulnerable to a variety of attacks. Security mitigation mechanisms are implemented in software and might be supported by a controller with basic security features. Recently, research was started to centralize security features in a single dedicated security controller. This security controller implements cryptographic methods and provides tamper resistance.

In general for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, message authentication is performed on every received wireless message by conducting verification for a valid signature, and only messages that have been successfully verified are processed further. In V2V safety communication, there are a large number of vehicles and each vehicle transmits safety messages frequently; therefore the number of received messages per second would be large. Thus authentication of each and every received message, for example based on the IEEE 1609.2 standard, is computationally very expensive and can only be carried out with expensive dedicated cryptographic hardware. An interesting observation is that most of these routine safety messages do not result in driver warnings or control actions since we expect that the safety system would be designed to provide warnings or control actions only when the threat of collision is high.

Due to economic, environmental and political reasons, there is an increasing demand for zero-emission vehicles. With the wide-scale deployment of electric car systems, a variety of parties with conflicting interests will be interacting, and there will be incentives for dishonest behavior. Consequently, new technical challenges that are related to IT security and embedded security arise in the context of electric vehicle systems. For instance, payment and metering needs to be secured, privacy needs to be preserved, and the infrastructure needs to be protected. This work investigates for the first time the security threats that must be addressed in intelligent transportation systems, it discusses possible solutions, and it presents the benefits that IT security provides in this context.

For new automotive applications and services, information technology (IT) has gained central importance. IT-related costs in car manufacturing are already high, and they will increase dramatically in the future. Yet whereas the area of safety and reliability has become a relatively well-established field, the protection of vehicular IT systems against systematic manipulation or intrusion has only recently started to emerge. Nevertheless, IT security is already the base of some vehicular applications, such as immobilizers or digital tachographs. To securely enable future automotive applications and business models, IT security will be one of the central technologies for the next generation of vehicles. After a state-of-the-art overview of IT security in vehicles, this paper will give a short introduction into cryptographic terminology and functionality.

An increasing number of vehicular electronic control units (ECU) are equipped with reprogrammable flash memory. The software program in the flash memory determines the behavior of the ECU. The program code usually can be updated via a bootloader, e.g., for a firmware update, a bug fix, or an update enabling additional functionality. The download might be performed over a diagnostic channel or in the future increasingly through wireless channels, e.g. Bluetooth or GSM connection. Once such communication channels are opened to the outside world for downloading software, the authenticity of the software must be ensured. An example of a malicious software download is the replacement of firmware by an unauthorized party, e.g., as is done on a large scale through chip tuning in vehicles. In order to control software updates, digital signatures play a central role.