The connected vehicles market is expected to reach US$882 bn by 2028, according to a report by Statista. This brings in a plethora of opportunities for OEMs to earn a huge amount of revenue in the upcoming years. Do you know what it means? It simply means an invitation to upcoming issues in the connected mobility ecosystem.
One of the most devastating problems in connected vehicles is the risk of cyber-attacks. But before we delve deeper into the cybersecurity challenges in the automotive industry, let’s deep dive and explore the outcomes of cyber-attacks in detail.
Emerging Cyber Risks, A Matter of Concern for OEMs
Cyber-attacks are a real concern for most OEMs. All thanks to the ever-growing security challenges at various user levels! The potential sources of these attacks can be third-party suppliers seeking benefits in negotiations or litigation, criminals willing to steal customer data, or competitors attempting to disrupt business. Consequently, they can use the vehicle data to:
Access autonomous-drive functions, engine, and breaks via vulnerabilities in sensors
Control vehicles that rely on back-end servers through unauthorized data access
Manipulate vehicle data for on-board diagnostics that can further deregulate the vehicles’ performance
Intervene in the data of various modules, including connectivity, voice recognition, etc.
Generate multiple DOS (Denial of Service) events adversely impacting the vehicle’s functionality, safety, and security
Although these cybersecurity-related issues in the automotive cloud are an anxiety for OEMs and enterprises, there is always a scope to prevent them. Implementation of proper network segmentation and deploying required security measures to prevent unauthorized access to data is one of the possibilities. However, there are a few challenges they face before reaching this point. Let’s explore some of them.
Underlying Challenges to Address Cybersecurity Threats
Technological Advancements: An Invitation to Complexities
With the rapidly growing automotive market, the launch of new vehicle models with advanced functionalities is inevitable. Consequently, it increases the number of potential points of attack in connected vehicles. For instance, an average vehicle potentially contains around 30 ECUs, and this number can increase up to 100 ECUs for complex vehicles. On top of it, there are individual TCUs that pick high volumes of vehicle data coming from these ECUs.
Additionally, each TCU embeds a dedicated operating system with hundreds of millions of lines of code during an over-the-air software update. All in all, it’s an invitation to the complexities of reducing vulnerabilities even with advanced IT skills.
Multiple Stakeholders Dependency: A Significant Integration Risk
In the present scenario, OEMs encounter significant risks due to their failure to integrate sufficient testing capabilities to mitigate upcoming vulnerabilities. It simply means the increased dependency of OEMs and enterprises on different suppliers to integrate components.
Furthermore, it can put the vehicle data at security risk due to poor integration, increasing the attack surface in connected vehicles.
Different Manual Processing Layers: An Expansion in Security Gaps
Several times it’s up to engineers to manually detect, prioritize, and resolve security issues in an IoT environment. It’s a time-consuming process and can lead to misconfigurations, oversights, and errors resulting in data breaches.
For instance, Kubernetes is an excellent open-source platform for automating containerized applications. However, undergoing manual compliance audits to meet Kubernetes benchmark recommendations is time-taking, welcoming new vulnerabilities that go undetected. Furthermore, it increases the need to automate these manual compliance audits too.
Condense: Building Close Integration Between Software and Associated Firmware
Zeliot’s Condense, a low-code, click-to-deploy managed app, securely ingests and manages millions of real-time data pipelines at scale. Since it’s deployable on users’ infrastructure, the data never leaves the IoT environment which ensures data security and access management during the integration process.
Besides that, Condense automatically deploys as a read-only system with a few permissions related to network administration and private Kubernetes clusters. Consequently, it safeguards the workloads from tampering or accidental deletion.
A Representation of Data Transmission Between Condense and Zeliot Centralised System
All in all, the transmission of data between Condense and Zeliot Centralized Tower is safeguarded by employing encryption protocols, wherein a token derived from the Client ID is utilized.
Zeliot’s Central Tower plays the role of an orchestration platform, exercising control over various microservices. This includes granting authorization for data sharing, facilitating notification services, implementing a metering mechanism to monitor data consumption, and enabling billing based on resource utilization. Additionally, Central Tower assumes responsibility for user management within the system.
Wrapping it up:
The automotive industry is still in the process of establishing a secure connected mobility ecosystem. It’s the need of an hour for OEMs and Enterprises to establish a robust culture of cyber security in their entire product development lifecycle.