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A innovative way to fight against automotive electronics tampering

MAb

The security of automotive  electronics  systems is an escalating topic of concern for automotive OEMs,  owners  and the insurance industry. Electronic control of automotive systems is   steadily increasing, with large amounts of data streaming through body  control  modules (BCM)/gateways.


Freescale Semiconductor is helping  significantly reduce  the security risks for that data with new  additions to its MPC56xx family of Qorivva  32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) built on Power ArchitectureRegistered  technology.  At  the high end, the MPC564xB/C devices are the first MCUs for the  automotive  market that incorporate a cryptographic services engine  (CSE), which enables secure  and trustworthy transmission of information  between electronic components. Cryptography  is used in the automotive  industry to encode and decode data for various  functions, such as  blocking illegal manipulation of a vehicle’s mileage, activating   immobilizers that prevent a car from being stolen without the key and  preventing  individual electronic control units from being dismantled  and reused in other  vehicles.


How would you leverage on this innovation ?

 

More information on this annoucement here (element14 website)

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  • 0
    Preventing criminals to tamper immobilizers that prevent a car from being stolen is a good case.
    Making it impossible to repair or reuse electronic control units is not.
    Maintenance by others than the original manufacturer should not be prevented this way.
    If there is no competition, the cost of maintenance and repair will be high.
    If repair is made impossible this way, a new electronic control unit must be purchased in case of a failure. Otherwise a refurbished electronic control unit or a unit from a crashed car could be used.
    If a car is more than five years old and the electronic control unit is obsolete, it would be nice when units from other cars could be used to repair this car.
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  • 0
    Preventing criminals to tamper immobilizers that prevent a car from being stolen is a good case.
    Making it impossible to repair or reuse electronic control units is not.
    Maintenance by others than the original manufacturer should not be prevented this way.
    If there is no competition, the cost of maintenance and repair will be high.
    If repair is made impossible this way, a new electronic control unit must be purchased in case of a failure. Otherwise a refurbished electronic control unit or a unit from a crashed car could be used.
    If a car is more than five years old and the electronic control unit is obsolete, it would be nice when units from other cars could be used to repair this car.
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  • 0 in reply to jvdberg@ieee.org

    How OEMs ultimately decide to implement security and how security software will be applied to replacement modules in the field is something to keep an eye open for. With additional security comes some form of additional control. The amount of control that the OEM ultimately implements in the car can vary vastly. Security does not have to be all about protecting modules from being stolen and reused in another vehicle. But in the case of validly using refurbished electronic control units, the OEM needs to have a secure and controlled means to provide outside repair facilities with approved security keys for the refurbished ecus. The service work does not have to be done directly at the OEM repair facility. The OEM could have "certified" 3rd party repair facilities that could provided the fully enabled refurbished ecus as well. 

  • 0 in reply to Former Member

    If only the OEM and "certified" 3rd party repair facilities"  can perform maintenance or make modifications, there is no real competition. Especially for older cars, owned by people with a lower budget, this will be too expensive. If someone owns a car, he should also have access to its "security keys"

    I can imagine automobile manufacturers like to control the lifecycle of their products with tamper proof software. In my experiance this is unfair competition.