Remote Testimony: How to Trust an Autonomous Vehicle
Francesco Alesiani, Sebastian Gajek · 2016
With the advance of Car2X communication models, vehicles become a virtual part of intelligent traffic infrastructures, requiring remote interaction of safety-critical components. The availability of such an integrated system could provide high advantage for the mobility of persons and goods. In this scenario, one of the main concerns with intelligent cars and their network interconnectivity is the susceptibility to cyber-physical attacks. We present a novel concept to establish trust, reliability and safety in intelligent vehicles. Our idea allows a peer in the network to receive a testimony that a vehicle's safety-critical components have not been compromised and as a mater of fact communicate reliable and trustful data. We describe a remote testimony architecture and demonstrate its immunity in the crucial case of an adversary having full control over the vehicle's central units. Our architecture refrains from the heavy and expensive machinery of trusted computing solutions. It makes minimal trust assumptions on the underlying hardware and requires from sensors tamper resistance and provision of a digital signature.