“Autonomous vehicles must deal with a variety of cyberattacks, with the “Jeep Hack” being one of the most famous. Here, researchers broke through the car radio system, bypassed the gateway and managed to manipulate the driving stack,” explains Prof. Marcus Völp in a recent interview with Techsense.
“During the last 20 to 30 years, we have seen that we are capable of building strong defences, making it more difficult for adversaries to break into systems. However, no matter how strong the defences are, they still have flaws. We do not prevent intrusion because that is impossible to achieve, but instead mitigate the impact of intruders gaining control of some of the functionalities of the system.”
In this interview, Prof. Völp gives insights on his latest project “ADMORPH”, a Horizon 2020 project, funded by the European Commission, in collaboration with industry partners such as Qmedia, Collins Aerospace, Thales, Sysgo, and six academic partners. Among other topics, this project investigates resilience techniques at all levels of the hardware and software stacks that control cyber-physical systems like autonomous cars. He gives details on the work of his research group CritiX (Critical and Extreme Security and Dependability) in this project with the aim to make autonomous cars more resilient.
“We worked mainly on two points to resist attacks. The first ensures that we can tolerate faults, whereas the second aims to achieve that faulty components are repaired, and that the system adapts to whatever situation it faces.”
He finally advices steps towards safer cyber conditions for autonomous cars: “Governments could prevent mishaps from happening by enforcing the right laws to require systems to become resilient to cyberattacks. A key question is what responsibility is left to companies and what is the government’s liability, especially if the nation’s wealth and well-being is at stake. SnT is there to help.”