Automobile ECU Design to Avoid Data Tampering

Abstract

Modern embedded vehicle systems are based on network architectures. Vulnerabilities from in-vehicle communications are significant. Privacy and security measures are required for vehicular Electronic Control Units (ECUs). We present a security vulnerability analysis, which shows that the vulnerability mainly lies in the ubiquitous on-board diagnostics II (OBD-II) interface and the memory configuration within ECU. Countermeasures using obfuscation and encryption techniques are introduced to protect ECUs from data sniffing and code tampering. A security scheme of deploying lures that look like ECU vulnerabilities to deceive lurking intruders into installing rootkits is proposed. We show that the interactions between the attacker and the system can be modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP).