Innovating Automotive Cybersecurity

– by Courtney Mann

Our lives today are all about convenience, customization, and constant connectivity to our devices and online lives. The cell phone, an incredibly revolutionary technology only a few decades ago, is much more than just a portable device we speak from. We download applications, pay bills, video chat, listen to music, and so much more. As we are able to customize these devices to our ongoing and ever-evolving needs, we crave that same functionality in our vehicles, ‘iPhone-izing’ the modern vehicle and de-tesla-ing the industry. Why shouldn’t we be able to safely personalize our vehicles?

The way we interact, drive our cars, and transport goods over the roads is on the verge of a fundamental change. In the future, the road experience for hundreds of millions of people and companies will shift, especially with respect to data monetization and vehicular personalization. The automotive industry is moving to a service-oriented vehicle, where the passengers (or drivers) and their needs are the focal point, rather than the vehicle itself. This concept is founded on the ability to continuously and securely change vehicle capabilities, instantaneously, on-demand and over-the-air (OTA) from future OEM app stores while providing a secure in-vehicle cloud to host, process and store the plethora of data generated daily.

Imagine living in an urban city and driving a Porsche – you’re mostly stuck in traffic and can’t enjoy the full capabilities of your car. The weekend arrives and you decide to take your Porsche to the race track. Through the press of a button from the OEM app store, you can temporarily upgrade your horsepower, tire traction, suspension or engine performance, giving yourself that race-car functionality and driving a Porsche the way it was designed to be driven. Once finished there is a simple roll-back process, in effect converting the driver to a subscriber of services and enabling new revenue streams for OEMs apart from the initial sale of the vehicle in the aftermarket, including valuable data monetization.

As vehicle complexity and connectivity requirements increase, the need for post-production scalability and extensibility is rising. Furthermore, a secured end-point or in-vehicle cloud within the vehicle becomes increasingly vital to the automotive value chain.

With increasing connectivity come increases in services and applications. Such services increase the attack vector surface and therefore require a deterministic, robust and secure host within the vehicle’s various systems. Moreover, such services change dynamically as end-consumers demands change – requiring a high level of flexibility and scalability from the underlying system hosting them.

In order to use a vehicle as the platform for application downloads from the OEM app store, it is essential that one has a cybersecurity solution that can function as the secure landing place within the vehicle and can securely host, store and process such applications. In order to do so, such solutions should be service-oriented by design and enable secured high-performance onboard data storage and processing to facilitate vehicle customization.

ABOUT THE SOLUTION
GuardKnox’s expertise and experience are centered around cyber defense in mission-critical embedded systems that demand 100% fail-safe protection. GuardKnox’s patented Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is enabling the paradigm shift towards a service-oriented vehicle by ensuring hardware and software level separation between all resources, applications and operating systems. SOA enables mission-critical and non-mission critical applications to run simultaneously without interference; if one application should be compromised, all others will not be affected – facilitating limitless customization and data monetization without the added risks.

The patented Communication Lockdown™ Methodology, a completely deterministic approach, differs from all other IT-based solutions by locking down all network communications and parsing all messages on three different layers to ensure the highest level of protection.

GuardKnox is a leading cyber-solutions company providing optimized and cyber secure high-performance computing platforms to not only ensure security and safety but serve as the foundational layer for added levels of connectivity. Since participating in STARTUP AUTOBAHN, GuardKnox has been working extensively with the top German OEMs.