Autonomous Vehicles: Cybersecurity is The Key Factor

By CIO Applications| Tuesday, February 19, 2019

The growing number of connected cars is no surprise. Manufacturers are making more of it; more people are driving them than ever which implies that the malicious actors will have a bigger target than ever. This is dangerous than a credit card mishap because a hacker getting into the vehicle’s connected system could cause a passenger or a driver to lose their lives.

Have a look at these three cybersecurity objectives that must be addressed.

1.    Legitimate Communications: One must assure that no-one can take unauthorized access or control to the car while safeguarding data in transit which is essential for privacy.

2.    Protecting hardware and software: Protection of hardware, software, firmware as well as related-processed data is a real challenge especially when one has to implement cryptography mechanisms that demand significant computational.

3.    Detection of anomalies: Detection of abnormal events is a must to prevent any intrusion or cyber-attack on a vehicle.

New Era of Risks, But Mitigation is Essential

The augment of autonomous cars is thrilling but it comes with numerous challenges that one needs to address. To face these challenges, one knows that solutions are not only at an initial stage, but they are also not mainly dedicated to the automotive industry. Managing and acting upon the rising security threats has become complicated, especially for large fleets. Therefore it is advisable to adopt a robust Security Operations Centre (SOC) to ensure that all alerts are handled and taken care of properly.

The detection of behavioral anomalies indicates that there is a need for sophisticated algorithms, but because of technical and cost limitations, they cannot reside in most of the vehicles today.  Hence, to be fully capable, SOCs will need to deploy the advanced anomaly detection technology to analyze the data coming from cars over the network and detect those anomalies quickly. A lot is being expected from 2019; it can be a ‘make or break’ year for vehicle cybersecurity.