Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - December 2024 - 18

MAKING SOFTWARE-DEFINED
VEHICLES CYBER-SECURE
Digital twins can
help OEMs such
as International
to test security
updates for
various vehicle
platforms and
configurations.
Virtualization features such as digital twins and virtual patching can accelerate
development and make commercial vehicles more agile and secure.
by Ryan Gehm
T
here is one sure-fire way to secure commercial vehicles from
cyber-attacks. " You just remove the connectivity, " quipped
Brandon Barry, CEO of Block Harbor Cybersecurity and the
moderator of a panel session on " cybersecurity of virtual machines "
at the SAE COMVEC 2024 conference in Schaumburg, Illinois.
Obviously, that train has left the station - commercial vehicles of
all types, including trains, are only becoming more automated and
connected, which increases the risks for cyber-attacks. " We have
very connected vehicles, so attacks can be posed not just through
powertrain solutions but also through telemetry, infotainment systems
connected to different applications and services, and also
through cloud platforms, " said Trisha Chatterjee, current product
support and data specialist for fuel cell and hydrogen technology at
Accelera by Cummins.
Virtualization features such as virtual machine introspection (VMI),
virtual patching, and application isolation and sandboxing bring benefits
but also pose challenges, Chatterjee said. " We are talking about
very dense, integrated systems with lots of abstraction layers. The first
challenge that comes to my mind is real-time performance and latency. "
Virtualization is still in the conceptual phase, according to Chatterjee.
She said that Accelera is in the process of analyzing and verifying the
effectiveness of incorporating virtualization in its products.
" By incorporating our layers of abstraction with better integrity
and interoperability, we can address virtualization throughout an entire
vehicle ecosystem, " Chatterjee said. " That would make our system
more integrated. It would add more granularity and controllability
towards doing any sort of vulnerability analysis or patching or
doing any calibration or software updates. "
Chatterjee stressed that these concerns are not limited to on-highway
vehicles. " For railway, it's way more complex because we deal with very
close-knit and complex network signals, " she said. " If one train gets
hacked or if the signal system gets hacked, it can result in a complete
shutdown of the control centers and cause a lot of disruption. It's more
straightforward for commercial vehicles in on-highway applications. "
18 December 2024
Digital twins aid development
George Alvarez, vehicle cybersecurity architect at
International, talked about virtualization as a tool to
accelerate development of cybersecurity controls.
" How can we adapt some of those concepts like digital
twins? It'd be a big win if I didn't need access to every
vehicle type, every ECU at all times in order to test out
some of the solutions and theories and issues that we
might face with security. But that's easier said than
done. We're going to need a lot of computational
overhead, " he said. " At the end of the day, you still
have to test your controls on the vehicle. "
With so many vehicle platforms and configurations,
International faces a challenge to test the impact of
deploying security updates to every combination,
Alvarez said. " That's not to say that we would with
virtualization, but we'd increase the scope, " he added.
" Also, it's a sandbox for pushing out the security updates,
making sure that we understand what we're
putting out into the market onto our vehicles. "
Software-defined vehicles will require more resilient
and faster over-the-air updates. " Having these virtual validation
environments would serve us well, " Alvarez said.
" If we are going to move toward a more agile vehicle,
that also means we need to be as agile as attackers, "
Barry said. " If you build a digital twin and are
able to test patches against vulnerabilities very quickly,
that's the world we're going to be moving into. "
Building dynamic trust
Bob Kaster, chief technical expert for cross-division cybersecurity
at Bosch, discussed his doctoral research in
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
INTERNATIONAL
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - December 2024

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