In the automotive aftermarket, cybersecurity is developed as needed or on an ad-hoc basis. Essentially, a threat is brought to the attention of the developers and they create a patch or an update. Or maybe there is a bug that is detected by someone in the field who is not a hacker, it’s reported and a fix is created.
Either way you can see that this is not a sustainable solution. You simply cannot take the complex systems of the modern automobile and continue to automate and improve them without having some type of cybersecurity infrastructure in place before the products are built.
You would not put your money in a bank that waits for the bank to be robbed to figure out how they are going to protect it from the next robbery. That would be unreasonable. But that is what we are asking our customers to do today.
Welcome development
The development of a cybersecurity technology suite designed and built into automotive systems is a welcome development. And, quite frankly, it is inevitable. This is essentially the next step. Honeywell and LG are working on developing software and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) that will be baked into their new products.
Lee Woo-Jong of LG said that there are more than two dozen clearly defined attack surfaces on the modern automobile. An attack surface is simply a defined area of the computer network that can be vulnerable to attack. Every time you add a new computer, you run the risk of adding a new attack surface that can be exploited.
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So what are these technologies? Well IDPS is an active technology that aggressively looks for anomalies or strange patterns in a car’s internal computer network. Cars have multiple computers and these computers are more and more integrated into one another. Whereas a firewall protects the perimeter of a network and keeps bad things from coming in, an IDPS scans and monitors the inside of the network to find bad things that are originating from the inside. Keep in mind that many attacks originate from inside a computer network.
On the other hand, LG is working on software that will integrate with the interior OEM systems to make them more hardened and aware of cyberattack. This software utilizes LG’s transmission control unit (TCU) and electronic control unit (ECU) modules to make this software fit seamlessly into the car’s systems, detecting anomalies and looking for threats. These two processes will be utilized according to the needs of the automobile and the level of integration the manufacturers choose.
I suggest they look at these seriously and figure out how they can integrate them into the development of new systems. Once this happens it will evolve into a more widely accepted technology, and that will evolve into a standard.
We need standards
Once this evolves into a standard we will then be moving into a more formal standards process and will have much greater efficacy in our cybersecurity for our industry.
This is all good news. These are the types of things that make our ability to innovate and move forward more succinct and safe. These types of standards make all of our jobs easier.
Proactive not reactive
Just like the bank robbery example earlier, it is these types of systems that move you from a reactive threat defense to a proactive threat defense. Waiting for the bank robbery to happen is the same as a firewall. You are waiting for the attack to occur. The absolute best you can hope for is that it is a known attack and you can defend against it.
Unfortunately, hackers use new attacks all of the time and it is up to us to try to keep up with their new exploits. That is why these types of technologies are such a welcome development. We need to be actively looking for these anomalies along the way and make them part of our new car development. That’s a tall order for a component manufacturer that is under pressure to keep costs down.
But if it is coming from major vendors such as Honeywell and LG, we should embrace it and figure out how we are going to exploit them in our processes.
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