Intrusion Resilience Systems for Modern Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper proposes Vehicular Intrusion Resilience Systems (IRS) that enhance safety by enabling critical vehicle applications to tolerate faults and zero-day attacks through Byzantine agreement protocols over multiple ECUs.

Contribution

It introduces IRS as a novel approach for vehicle security that leverages replicated state machines and Byzantine agreement, adapting to modern vehicular architectures.

Findings

IRS can run over existing vehicle networks with feasible latency

Evaluation shows compatibility with automotive applications

Modern architectures support intrusion resilience solutions

Abstract

Current vehicular Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems either incur high false-positive rates or do not capture zero-day vulnerabilities, leading to safety-critical risks. In addition, prevention is limited to few primitive options like dropping network packets or extreme options, e.g., ECU Bus-off state. To fill this gap, we introduce the concept of vehicular Intrusion Resilience Systems (IRS) that ensures the resilience of critical applications despite assumed faults or zero-day attacks, as long as threat assumptions are met. IRS enables running a vehicular application in a replicated way, i.e., as a Replicated State Machine, over several ECUs, and then requiring the replicated processes to reach a form of Byzantine agreement before changing their local state. Our study rides the mutation of modern vehicular environments, which are closing the gap between simple and resource-constrained "real-time and embedded systems", and complex and powerful "information technology" ones. It shows that current vehicle (e.g., Zonal) architectures and networks are becoming plausible for such modular fault and intrusion tolerance solutions,deemed too heavy in the past. Our evaluation on a simulated Automotive Ethernet network running two state-of-the-art agreement protocols (Damysus and Hotstuff) shows that the achieved latency and throughout are feasible for many Automotive applications.