Risk Assessment and Security Countermeasures for Vehicular Instrument Clusters

The vehicular instrument cluster has the vital task of informing the driver on vehicle status or potential malfunctions. While this role is merely informative, the implications are far reaching as the driver needs to take decisions based on the reports provided by the instrument cluster. Past attacks on instrument clusters were rather concerned with mundane tasks, e.g., mileage modification, but giving false information to the driver on vehicle speed or triggering/hiding relevant alarms may have serious consequences as it can lead to severe traffic accidents. In this work we discuss risks associated to attacker actions on instrument clusters and envision a potential model-based intrusion detection system to detect potential attacks. Rather than advocating a holistic approach, in which security is designed for the entire vehicle network, e.g. CAN or FlexRay, we follow a component-based approach in which particularities of the instrument cluster and redundancy of information are used to detect potential attacks.