The AutoCHERI project has developed and is testing new use-cases to reduce cyber security risk and enhance the safety, security, and performance of connected vehicles.
The project will prove technology to reduce cyber security risks on next generation vehicle architectures. These architectures are characterised by having consolidated computer power in a few centralised, high-performance nodes. The benefit of having fewer nodes is that they are faster and more power efficient.
The project is being delivered by a consortium consisting of Beam Connectivity, Applus+ IDIADA, Swansea University, University of Exeter and Compound Semiconductor Applications (CSA) Catapult.
Read more about the project:
AutoCHERI project addresses cyber security risks in the automotive industry
Cyber security for vehicles is really important um today uh a vulnerability in the software in your vehicle could result in it being stolen by organized crime or thieves um but if we fast forward 10 years into the future and think about autonomous vehicles or semi-autonomous Vehicles a fleet of
Those driving around um a hack on that would be more like a critical National infrastructure issue if you could uh incapacitate a whole city or a whole country there’s quite a great opportunity with autonomous vehicles in the future to improve productivity to reduce the number of Road accidents and
These systems rely on a fusion of different sensors and connectivity Solutions and if you’re going to be making Split Second autonomous decisions you need to have great resilience to cyber threats so the auto chery project is uh looking at applying a new chip level Innovation to the automotive
Industry this chip Innovation is called Cherry which stands for capability Hardware enhanced risk instructions and it’s a new instruction set for processors which is uh more um secure and increases the memory safety the aary project is an innovate UK Grant funded project under the digital security by
Design program the first chip to use CH V instruction set is called a Mello it’s a chip from arm and in this project what we’re doing is we’re taking the Mel and we’re putting it into one of beam connectivity’s telematics control units and then what we’re doing our consortion
Partners is we’re investigating what is the impact what is the benefit of using Melo for cyber resilience and therefore the safety of vehicles so there are five Partners in this project um beam connectivity we’re we’re leading the uh project we’ve got uh the University of exitor who are providing cyber security
Uh and code level support we’ve got the University of Swansea doing um pen testing and providing threat analysis uh appas idada who are doing a lot of systems engineering uh and looking at the requirements and the system architecture and finally The Compound Semiconductor applications catapult who are are kind of interface into the
Industry it’s a very healthy interface with policy units and with International bodies that are all looking at Hardware security looking at how we build over a secure and resilient semiconductor future CSA catapult has a legacy of many years working with industry so that means we have very close ties across
Across the supply chain and in particular Automotive is an area which we have a great strength and within multiple projects we have a reach into many of the players who would be working on this type of Technology we’re using our access to the supply chain different stakeholders um for our business
Development and Commercial functions we’re setting up stakeholder meetings engagement and an industry Advisory Group the University of exitor our research group is focusing on developing secure and trustworthy software systems So within the AER project we are evaluating how that novel Hardware architecture can help to develop more secure software Apple cada provide
Services to the automotive industry through uh development engineering vehicle testing and homologation we provided the vehicle installed the equipment and ensured all of that equipment worked at the vehicle level uh we were also responsibility for the cyber security analysis phase connected an auton Vehicles expose a great number of wireless radios so
You’ve got Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to a smartphone or a home Wi-Fi hotspot you’ve got satellite Communications for um GPS but also for um non-terrestrial networks so starlink and and um communication satellites um you’ve also got uh um Cellular Connections to uh OEM back offices all of these connections together become different attack vectors
Into the system um and so a connected an autonomous vehicle inherently has more of these which makes it more susceptible to attack when people write software um there are quite often vulnerabilities in there which are not found until much later in once it’s in the field they
Estimate that 60 to 70% of all vulnerabilities in software are caused by memory safety so that’s where a developer has allocated a set of memory um and overwritten that or gone too far um now these aren’t often picked up during development time they manifest in the field uh and sometimes they’re never
Found and sometimes they’re found by um mili hackers we’ve seen a number of threats recently that are targeting the hardware of modern systems the UK’s embarked on a major project under the digital security by Design initiative to address low-level threats uh at Hardware level and for us to design them out the unique
Feature of this project is that cherry checks for those memory violations in Hardware instead of in software and that promises to be much more efficient and much faster than if you do the same checks in software and also of course for ncher it’s much harder to override
Hardware checks than it would be to override software checks within the next 10 years we’re going to see Automotive networks um consolidate from being hundreds of small computers connected via a network in the car to uh consolidated high performance compute nodes in the vehicle so you might have a
Handful of those um when that happens we’ll have uh lots of separate software functions all running on the same Hardware now if you don’t have memory safety that means that uh one software feature can interfere with another it’s like on your on your mobile phone one app interfering with another app on your
Phone um so what we’re trying to do is ensure that memory safety is in place and compartmentalization is in place so that each individual software function can’t interfere with others at Swansea University our focus is mainly on four use cases in the first use case then it looking into the cyber security aspect
Of overthe a update then you’re also looking into uh um the diagnostic data is ascending from the vehicle to the cloud service the next one that is look on the communications between the veh and the cloud for traffics and accident advisories and finally the last one is that you’re looking at the remote
Control of the vehicle for each of the use cases we’re looking at the impact of cherry of Mel on Cyber resilience and on safety of connected vehicle applications after 19 months we’ve implemented all four use cases we’ve done that first of all in a laboratory environment then we’ve taken it to various testing
Grounds for example in milbrook where we’ve um rolled out uh the the use cases and and then we’ve tested that they’re working we’re now doing penetration testing to check whether from a uh an independent perspective this has also improved the Cyber resilience of the systems with the reporting and the
Findings that we’ve demonstrated so far and with the input significantly from the industry advisory we’re now at a position where we could develop bigger larger scale projects we can take it to other critical parts of the vehicle we can share that information and work in partnership with industry another key
Element following that would be to start to work within standardization and within the the different regulatory uh rules that are required there to meet compliance we got very good engineering teams at beam connectivity um at appas idada uh at our partners at University of Swansea and University of exter so a
Tech development has gone really really well and in fact you know we’re mostly wrapped that up what we’re trying to do now is write a number of reports which outline the benefits of cherry and and murel the next steps from our perspective is the knowledge we’ve gained gives us a good understanding of
Current and future Technologies um and that will help us work with our Automotive clients to ensure that they are benefiting from from the knowledge that we’ve we’ve now gained Cherry is is an understood technique to uh reduce some cyber security threats used in other Industries and other applications uh
This project has demonstrated how it can be used within an automotive application and thereby demonstrates how the automotive clients and customers can benefit from the expertise from other uh technical areas at the moment we are talking about a prototype architecture a prototype Hardware that is not available
To the general public that is available within a research Community the next big step essentially is that it is widely available s University’s role in the auto cherry and dsbd initiative is twofold the first area is to look at the risk Assessments in terms of the cherry and Mel integration in Automotive
Systems the second area of interest for us is of course the economic case of Cherry and how do we make sure that the early adopters integrate cherry and Mel into their design cycle into their products and still have a commercially viable offering the UK’s recently announced National semiconductor strategy is pushing for Hardware
Security as a key competitive Advantage for the UK the auto Cherry project is critical in demonstrating to the automotive industry that adoption of cherry is entirely feasible and viable and there’s very strong return on investment to be had one of the really exciting opportunities here is that
Anything that connects that could an iot device anything where we’ve got some form of control and we’ve got some form of connectivity this technology can be applied so we’re really excited to think that this could cover a range of of end end uh sectors could Aerospace Rail and
So the opportunities for the application of Technology are enormous and very exciting