Security Assessment and Hardening of Autonomous Vehicles

In recent years, experts have noted the risks of hacking the autonomous vehicles. Since the latter become more complex, the number of potential vulnerabilities and the constraints on security algorithms increase. This paper proposes a model checking based framework that relies on a set of predefined attacks and counter measures from where
the security requirements are used to assess how well the model is secure. First, we formalize a system, a case of cyber physical systems, using UML class and activity diagrams. Further, we use UML to develop a meta language for autonomous vehicle systems, cyber attacks, and cyber counter measures. The framework instantiates the dependent-application diagrams for the domain application of autonomous vehicles, searches for the existing attack surfaces; then it generates the possible attacks that might exploit the found vulnerabilities/weaknesses. Further the proposed framework generates the proper java code for the composition counter measures, attacks, and smart vehicle models. Finally to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution, we model, analyze, harden , and evaluate our framework on a real use case.