Using a Cyber Digital Twin for Continuous Automotive Security Requirements Verification

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach using Cyber Digital Twins to continuously verify automotive security requirements by transforming firmware into a security-relevant digital model for automated analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a method to create Cyber Digital Twins from automotive firmware for ongoing security analysis and vulnerability detection.

Findings

Detected an average of 600 vulnerabilities per firmware

Enabled continuous security verification process

Applied approach to 100 automotive firmware samples

Abstract

A Digital Twin (DT) is a digital representation of a physical object used to simulate it before it is built or to predict failures after the object is deployed. In this article, we introduce our approach, which applies the concept of a Cyber Digital Twin (CDT) to automotive software for the purpose of security analysis. In our approach, automotive firmware is transformed into a CDT, which contains automatically extracted, security-relevant information from the firmware. Based on the CDT, we evaluate security requirements through automated analysis and requirements verification using policy enforcement checks and vulnerabilities detection. The evaluation of a CDT is conducted continuously integrating new checks derived from new security requirements and from newly disclosed vulnerabilities. We applied our approach to about 100 automotive firmwares. In average, about 600 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities and 80 unknown weaknesses were detected per firmware in the pre-production phase. Therefore, the use of a CDT enables efficient continuous verification of security requirements.