Exploring the Processing of Personal Data in Modern Vehicles - A Proposal of a Testbed for Explorative Research to Achieve Transparency for Privacy and Security

The IT-Security of cyber-physical systems is becoming a topic of increasing interest. With the development of new attack techniques against such cyber-physical systems there is an increased need of security, incident management and forensic methods to investigate and counter these threats. In general, incident management and forensic readiness in such non-traditional scenarios is hampered by a poor understanding (along with limited means of access) of all the potential data sources / traces and incident response mechanisms available. This work aims at increasing the understanding, and therefore the capability to perform incident response and forensic investigations, in non-traditional cyber-physical systems. The approach presented in this work is demonstrated in an automotive environment as one possible example of cyber-physical systems. It takes into account the broad array of data, which modern automotive systems collect. However, this data is well hidden from the consumer and independent incident manager/forensic investigator. By achieving transparency regarding this data, forensic capabilities are increased. Hence, this work introduces a concept to locate, acquire and identify (privacy-related) data stored inside modern cars. To (partially) implement the concept, a physical testbed for explorative research on data in modern vehicles is introduced. Based on this testbed, various data streams inside the vehicle were located and successfully identified allowing to investigate their implications in privacy related incidents and the forensic process.