Virtualization for Automotive Safety and Security Exploration

A modern automobile system is a safety-critical distributed embedded system that incorporates more than a hundred Electronic Control Units, a wide range of sensors, and actuators, all connected with several in-vehicle networks. Obviously, integration of these heterogeneous components can lead to subtle errors that can be possibly exploited by malicious entities in the field, resulting in catastrophic consequences. We develop a prototyping platform to enable the functional safety and security exploration of automotive systems. The platform realizes a unique, extensible virtualization environment for the exploration of vehicular systems. The platform includes a CAN simulator that mimics the vehicular CAN bus to interact with various ECUs, together with sensory and actuation capabilities. We show how to explore these capabilities in the safety and security exploration through the analysis of a representative vehicular use case interaction.