A Novel Method for Secure Odometer in Automotive Systems 2023-01-0042

Vehicular odometers serve as a standard component in driver assistance system to provide continuous navigation. Odometer fraud is the disconnection, resetting, or alteration of a vehicle’s odometer with the intent to change the number of miles indicated. Odometer fraud occurs when the seller of a vehicle falsely represents the actual mileage of a vehicle to the buyer. But the Odometer readings are essential when it comes to ascertaining the fair market value of a used vehicle. Hence, there is a need to protect the odometer which resides in the instrument cluster of the digital cockpit. Any manipulation is very difficult to detect and to prove once made, even by expert technicians using specific On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) testing devices. One of the most critical issues is that currently odometers are not locked out from external access, in contrast to other vehicle components, which have higher protection levels. As a result, odometers are not sufficiently cyber-secured and there is a need to identify one – or more – technical solutions that would prevent their tampering. In this regard, a secure odometer solution is proposed here, which is deployed on a tamper proof hardware module with security features that are not available in the core processor in any Electronic Control Units (ECUs) to execute the proposed secure odometer solution. The secure tamper proof hardware is an add-on module to any vehicular processors for providing secure environment compared to conventional Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). The secure storage is stored a zero miles/kms value during the manufacturing by provisioning either in the trusted execution environment or the secure tamper proof hardware. The calculated distance from the odometer is added cumulatively into the secure storage distance under a fixed certain frequency. During each vehicle boot, the odometer error is calculated between the displayed distance and the distance stored in the secure storage like Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB). If the error exceeds the fixed threshold, then displayed distance is updated with the previously stored secure storage distance as a correction mechanism. Hence, odometer corruption is prevented.