Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - December 2024 - 19

CYBERSECURITY FEATURE
Cybersecurity for trains is more challenging than for on-highway
commercial vehicles, according to Accelera's Trisha Chatterjee. Alstom's
Coradia iLint train utilizing roof-mounted fuel cells from Accelera is shown.
the area of cybersecurity and some challenges to consider.
One opportunity is continuing to enhance security
of automotive controllers.
" One of the challenges is that the full image check on
an engine controller or braking controller or steering
controller might take but a couple of seconds. If you turn
your key to start the car and you have to wait a couple
seconds or minutes for all of the systems to start, that's
just not really an option, " Kaster said. " As part of my
doctoral research with Dr. Di Ma from the University of
Michigan, we developed a program to try and have an
accelerated secure boot process that meets the needs of
functional safety and uptime but also the security. "
Another project the team is working on is " dynamic
trust. " " As we move to have more of these autonomous
vehicles with advanced architectures and frequent
software updates, how can modules build trust
in this dynamic environment? " Kaster posed. He mentioned
the old paradigm involved highly specified
ECUs with each task having a single home. For example,
everything to do with braking had its own
brake controller, he said. Trust was built by using symmetric
keys to authenticate messages.
" The question of trust is, I got a message claiming to
be from the engine controller. Is it really from this module
that I've been trusting for my entire life? If yes, then
you trust it completely. If no, you just ignore it. That was
a static, binary and rigid trust model that worked for
today or yesterday's architectures, " Kaster said.
As the industry shifts to software-defined vehicles
with flexible vehicle architectures and powerful central
computers, the trust model needs to be dynamic, nuanced
and adaptive, Kaster said.
" If we were to say, 'I need to take this action, it's going
to have a big safety impact, so I need to have a lot of trust
in it.' And another module that might be using that same
information that doesn't have as big of a safety impact, it
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
A vehicle integration
platform from Bosch is said to
enable software-defined vehicles
with centralized E/E architectures,
offering a central secure gateway and enabling
software updates throughout a vehicle's lifetime.
wouldn't need as much trust to do it, " Kaster explained. " By building this
hypothetical dynamic trust model concept as part of my research for how
the detection system could potentially interact with safety systems, you
could have an OEM say, 'I have this radar where there is suspicious behavior
noted from the intrusion detection system.' The dynamic trust rating
in the vehicle might reduce the trust rating from say 92% to 82%, and
then have the systems in the vehicle respond accordingly without having
to develop new software, test the software, release the software and roll
it out, which might take several months. Or if you pull the hard switch and
say, 'You can't drive these vehicles at all for a week.' And then you're like,
'My bad, it wasn't a cyber-attack.' That could be a career-ending decision. "
Kaster also stressed that the commercial-vehicle and off-highway
industries need to be more proactive in adopting available technology
from the passenger-vehicle sector. " There are security measures available
in passenger cars that have not been rolled out to commercial
vehicles or off-road vehicles yet, " Kaster said. " The industry lags a bit
behind because with a thousand or ten-thousand parts a year, it's a
lot more difficult to roll out these new features than if you're making
ten-million parts a year. "
December 2024 19
FROM TOP: ALSTOM; BOSCH
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - December 2024

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