The Role of Self-Forensics in Vehicle Crash Investigations and Event Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of self-forensics in vehicles, formalizing a system that enables automated incident analysis and event reconstruction to enhance vehicle safety and incident investigation.

Contribution

It formalizes the design and requirements of self-forensic units in vehicles using Forensic Lucid, enabling autonomous incident analysis and event reconstruction.

Findings

Formal design of self-forensic vehicle units

Application of Forensic Lucid for vehicle incident analysis

Potential to improve vehicle safety and incident investigation

Abstract

This paper further introduces and formalizes a novel concept of self-forensics for automotive vehicles, specified in the Forensic Lucid language. We argue that self-forensics, with the forensics taken out of the cybercrime domain, is applicable to "self-dissection" of intelligent vehicles and hardware systems for automated incident and anomaly analysis and event reconstruction by the software with or without the aid of the engineering teams in a variety of forensic scenarios. We propose a formal design, requirements, and specification of the self-forensic enabled units (similar to blackboxes) in vehicles that will help investigation of incidents and also automated reasoning and verification of theories along with the events reconstruction in a formal model. We argue such an analysis is beneficial to improve the safety of the passengers and their vehicles, like the airline industry does for planes.