Securing Appified Autonomous Vehicles Platform with AVGUARD
Author(s): Yunhan Jack Jia, Ding Zhao, Qi Alfred Chen, Z. Morley Mao
Download: Poster (PDF)
Date: 11 May 2017
Document Type: Presentations
Associated Event: NDSS Symposium 2017
Abstract:
The advancement in Autonomous Vehicle (AV) has created an enormous market for the development of selfdriving functionalities, and has raised the question of how it will transform the traditional vehicle development process. One adventurous proposal is to open the AV platform to 3rd party developers, so that AV functionalities can be developed in a crowdsourcing way, which is supposed to provide tangible benefits to both automakers and end users. Some pioneering companies in the autonomy industry have made the move to open the platform so that developers are allowed to test their code on the road.
However, such openness brings serious security and safety issues by allowing untrusted code to run on the vehicle. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Appified AV platform that opens the development framework to 3rd party developers. To further address the safety challenges, we propose an enhanced appified AV design schema called AVGUARD, that focuses mainly on mitigating the threats brought by untrusted code, leveraging theory in the vehicle evaluation field, and also program analysis techniques in the cybersecurity area. Our study provides guidelines and suggested practice for the future design of open AV platforms.