A secured future for autonomous vehicles calls for a paradigm shift towards self-healing, in-vehicle cyber capabilities
With broken supply chains, a decrease in demand, and physical limitations, the automotive industry is amongst the hardest hit by Covid-19. As the market begins to recover in the second half of 2020, the constraints triggered by the ‘new normal’ are accelerating the rise of new technologies, sustainability policies, and consumer preferences across the mobility ecosystem. Particularly an acceleration in electrification efforts, digitization, and new business models that have already revolutionized a number of industries, and automotive will be no exception.
By 2030, 22% of the automotive revenue pool will come from shared mobility and data connectivity services such as apps and software upgrades.
(McKinsey & Company)
The rise of autonomous vehicles, which allow drivers to cede partial control will in turn enable them to conduct remote work and communicate safely using their organization IT remote infrastructure network, in a similar way to the work patterns during the pandemic.
Cyber risks are becoming increasingly complex and destructive
The automotive industry is facing a new risk profile, such as buggy software updates that can be uploaded to millions of cars simultaneously. In the past, a cyberattack on a single autonomous vehicle infotainment system or self-parking Bluetooth system could have caused an inconvenience but would not lead to life-threatening situations. The rise of connectivity and over-the-air (OTA) update capabilities can turn a fleet of vehicles into a global disaster.
The solution: self-healing capabilities
Dealing with the new cyber risks will be better addressed by establishing an autonomous, dynamic, and adaptive security architecture that will enable continuous protection to the fast-evolving cyber landscape. Without it, management A.I platforms might make flawed decisions that, combined with the power to take corrective actions, could prove fatal to defense.
One promising architecture that will effectively deal with risks while meeting the new business requirements is inspired by the human autonomous nervous system (i.e. immune system), which can be divided into two parts:
- Self-protecting from known threats (signature/classified scenario) – automatically anticipate and defend against attacks (e.g. the immunity to the Chickenpox)
- Self-healing from unknown/new threats – automatically detect, diagnose and repair problems dynamically (e.g. Coronavirus)
Autonomous security
We believe that self-healing capabilities are the cornerstone of networked vehicles’ ability to produce trustworthy, accurate, and reliable cyber-security data and feed it into centralized in-vehicle SIEM systems. These capabilities will aggregate and refine data from multiple sources to deal with the evolving cyber-threat landscape.
“Independent self-healing cyber capabilities are imperative as the first line of defense for the architecture of autonomous connected fleets of the future.”
Dr. Tal Cohen, Drive TLV’s founder
The autonomous network management framework enables every subsystem that has self-healing properties to discover, diagnose, and react to failures or potential abnormal activities. For example, the module will be able to detect any unavailability of a multicast service as well as reactively resolve malfunctions on several levels.
Our vast experience in the prescriptive analytics platforms shows that over time, as the self-healing infrastructure continuously strengthens, the A.I models can be trained to predict and prevent a variety of potential cyber-attacks, similar to how a self-driving vehicle learns to improve navigation every time it encounters a new object and environment.
Mobility is moving forward
The future of the automotive industry presents many challenges but also many new opportunities. To become a driver of change and benefit from the new global mindset of a post-Covid-19 world, incumbent players need to make fundamental and strategically vetted decisions now. The automotive industry is far from a state of decline; in fact, we believe its biggest moments are still to come leveraging the challenges into a new business opportunity.
