WHITEPAPER | July 1, 2014

A Survey of Remote Automotive Attack Surfaces

By looking at each car’s remote attack surface, internal network architecture, and computer controlled features, we are able to draw some conclusions about the suitability of the vehicle to remote attack. This doesn’t mean that the most susceptible looking isn’t in fact quite secure (i.e. coded very securely) or that the most secure looking isn’t in fact trivially exploitable, but it does provide some objective measure of the security of a large number of vehicles that wouldn’t be possible to examine in detail without a massive effort. It also provides an outline on how to design and construct secure vehicles, namely in making each of these three stages of exploitation as difficult as possible.

The authors also discuss different strategies to securing vehicles from remote attack in a layered, attack resilient fashion. In particular, it introduces a device that acts like a network intrusion detection and prevention device as well as discusses some early testing results.

Lastly, to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first publicly available resource for automotive network architecture review. While network architecture review is commonplace in modern network/computer security, much of automobile topology has been shrouded in secrecy.

Launch PDF