I-Corps: Physics-based Automotive Cybersecurity

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Dearborn, Dearborn MI

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of an embedded technology that may protect modern vehicles against automotive cybersecurity threats. The proposed innovation is expected to have impacts in several areas including security of modern connected vehicles, transportation safety, national security, and automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). With the advent and proliferation of autonomous and connected vehicles, the market size for OEMs and their in-vehicle (IVN) technologies is rapidly growing and is expected to maintain a growth trajectory to about $46 billion dollars. Automotive cyberthreat analysis, detection, and localization is an integral component of this growing market. The proposed innovation has the potential to save about $300 million dollars for automotive suppliers and OEMs over the next 5 years. The benefits of the innovation to society at large are significant in the areas including transportation safety, automotive industry, and the cyber insurance business. This I-Corps project is based on the development of security solutions to safeguard modern automobile in-vehicle networks (IVNs) against a wide array of cyberattacks. The proposed technology uses physics-based attack detection and localization in a simultaneous manner. Currently, using the existing engine control unit (ECU) diagnosis technologies, the vehicle ECU and in-vehicle cybersecurity engineers spend about 30 minutes to 1 hour for each vehicle to scan for potential security issues in IVNs. The proposed technology uses a physical fingerprinting framework consisting of embedded hardware devices and completely automatic in-vehicle network traffic analyzing algorithms to detect and localize malicious activities happening within the connected IVNs. This IVN cybersecurity tool, may protect the modern automobile IVNs against the ever-increasing number of cyberthreats and help the cybersecurity manager of OEMs and automotive suppliers to defend the IVNs of their products against the growing number of cyberattacks in a time- and cost-efficient manner. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.