Context-aware vehicle and fleet security combining a Knowledge Graph and an object-oriented model

A growing number of attacks and the introduction of new security standards, e.g. ISO 21434, are increasingly shifting the focus of industry and research to the cybersecurity of vehicles. Being cyber-physical systems, compromised vehicles can pose a safety risk to occupants and the environment. Updates over the air and monitoring of the vehicle fleet over its entire lifespan are therefore established in current and future vehicles. Elementary components of such a strategy are security sensors in the form of firewalls and intrusion detection systems, for example, and an operations center where monitoring and response activities are coordinated. A critical step in defending against, detecting, and remediating attacks is providing knowledge about the vehicle and fleet context. Whether a vehicle is driving on the highway or parked at home, what software version is installed, or what security incidents have occurred affect the legitimacy of data and network traffic. However, current security measures lack an understanding of how to operate in an adjusted manner in different contexts. This work is therefore dedicated to a concept to make security measures for vehicles context-aware. We present our approach, which consists of an object-oriented model of relevant context information within the vehicle and a Knowledge Graph for the fleet. With this approach, various use cases can be addressed, according to the different requirements for the use of context knowledge in the vehicle and operations center.