Security assessment for automotive controllers using side channel and fault injection attacks

Abstract

Embedded security is nowadays a hot topic. With the arrival of Internet of Things and the increasing demand of connectivity for embedded systems in many industrial markets, including automotive systems, security has become an important factor in product design. This thesis is aimed to test the security capabilities of automotive electronic devices, using physical attacks known as fault injection. Although other industries have been using countermeasures against physical attacks for decades, these are rarely used in automotive embedded systems. Automotive industry efforts have been focused in improving safety and reliability (e.g. ISO 26262 ASIL certification) instead of security. Previous research proved the risk of fault injection attacks on automotive SoCs, but these works were limited to small testing applications running on evaluation boards and not real automotive systems. The current work aims to assess the security of off-the-shelf automotive systems running real applications. More specifically, fault injection attacks are used to bypass the authentication mechanism of the Unified Diagnostic System (ISO 14229) present in two different commercial car dashboards. The findings are exposed in order to suggest design improvements and recommendations for a more secure automotive embedded systems and SoCs.