Cyber security impacts the automotive industry

Vector has summarised best practices of Daimler, Hella, Infineon, Porsche, Thales and ZF to achieve ‘Automotive Cybersecurity’. The experiences and case studies were presented at the Vector Cyber Security Symposium.

The Vector Cyber Security Symposium 2016 brought together automotive manufacturers, suppliers and companies from IT and security to share their experiences. Many speakers underlined that security engineering is a process that needs to be integrated into existing development processes. Each company should establish a risk-oriented cyber security management for its products, processes and supply chain, that works reliably and traceable throughout the whole life cycle and the entire supply chain.

"Security concepts must consider the vehicle and the IT systems inside and outside the vehicle", said Dr. Christian Meineck, Porsche AG.

A major issue is the need for joint consideration of safety and security aspects as well as the standardisation of security in order to achieve higher quality software in less time. Lorenz Slansky of Daimler appealed to the participants to get actively involved in the standardisation.

In order to not constantly reinvent the wheel, and to master the growing complexity across the industry, manufacturers and suppliers increasingly learn from IT. Established techniques can be adopted and adapted. Implementing distributed security architectures stepwise will help controlling complexity and costs.

Only a consistent methodology ensures comprehensible Cyber Security: from the initial hazard analysis to architecture decisions and verification to regression tests with each new delivery and change.