A Distributed `Black Box' Audit Trail Design Specification for Connected and Automated Vehicle Data and Software Assurance
This addresses security and reliability issues for users, service providers, and manufacturers in the automotive industry, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing technologies like blockchain and DHTs.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring software integrity and reliability in connected and automated vehicles by proposing a distributed 'black box' audit trail architecture, which uses distributed hash tables, a parity system, and a public blockchain to achieve high resilience, assurance, scalability, and efficiency.
Automotive software is increasingly complex and critical to safe vehicle operation, and related embedded systems must remain up-to-date to ensure long-term system performance. Update mechanisms and data modification tools introduce opportunities for malicious actors to compromise these cyber-physical systems, and for trusted actors to mistakenly install incompatible software versions. A distributed and stratified "black box" audit trail for automotive software and data provenance is proposed to assure users, service providers, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of vehicular software integrity and reliability. The proposed black box architecture is both layered and diffuse, employing distributed hash tables (DHT), a parity system and a public blockchain to provide high resilience, assurance, scalability, and efficiency for automotive and other high-assurance systems.