# Towards Secure and Safe Appified Automated Vehicles

## TL;DR

This paper proposes AVGuard, a security framework for open autonomous vehicle platforms that mitigates risks from untrusted third-party apps, ensuring safety and security in appified AV development.

## Contribution

It introduces AVGuard, a novel security design schema combining vehicle evaluation and cybersecurity analysis to enhance safety in open AV platforms.

## Key findings

- AVGuard effectively reduces security threats from untrusted apps.
- Guidelines for designing secure open AV platforms are provided.
- The approach integrates vehicle safety evaluation with cybersecurity techniques.

## Abstract

The advancement in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) has created an enormous market for the development of self-driving functionalities,raising the question of how it will transform the traditional vehicle development process. One adventurous proposal is to open the AV platform to third-party developers, so that AV functionalities can be developed in a crowd-sourcing way, which could provide tangible benefits to both automakers and end users. Some pioneering companies in the automotive industry have made the move to open the platform so that developers are allowed to test their code on the road. Such openness, however, brings serious security and safety issues by allowing untrusted code to run on the vehicle. In this paper, we introduce the concept of an Appified AV platform that opens the development framework to third-party developers. To further address the safety challenges, we propose an enhanced appified AV design schema called AVGuard, which focuses primarily on mitigating the threats brought about by untrusted code, leveraging theory in the vehicle evaluation field, and conducting program analysis techniques in the cybersecurity area. Our study provides guidelines and suggested practice for the future design of open AV platforms.