It was an honor to be a panelist at the recent EETimes Autonomous Tech Forum. The panel entitled “How to make AVs trustworthy and safe from cybersecurity threats” discussed system-level approaches to AV security, hardware-based security as a foundation, and the importance of security in the supply chain. Three important themes were touched upon.
First, securing your AV requires considering the entire system, including hardware, software, and interactions. Therefore, security should be built in from the beginning, rather than added on later. Every component is important because attackers exploit the weakest link. Second, strong hardware security is the foundation of such a holistic approach, since software security measures cannot fix fundamental weaknesses in the underlying hardware. We discussed techniques such as Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), secure enclaves, and hardware roots of trust. The third key theme was the supply chain. Given the complexity of the supply chain required to build an AV, it is important to ensure the integrity and provenance of hardware components and software. Therefore, key challenges that the industry must address head-on include traceability, authenticity verification, software bills of materials (SBOM), and countering threats such as counterfeiting and malicious insertion.
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