Secure Firmware Updates over the Air in Intelligent Vehicles

TLDR

Modern intelligent vehicles rely on electronic control units whose firmware is continually updated to fix bugs and add features, and manufacturers are moving toward over‑the‑air updates to accelerate deployment and enhance safety. This paper proposes a protocol for secure over‑the‑air firmware updates in vehicles. The protocol guarantees data integrity, authentication, confidentiality, and freshness by constructing a hash chain of the firmware, signing the first packet with a trusted source, and encrypting subsequent packets with symmetric keys. The protocol is computationally efficient, has low memory overhead, and is suitable for wireless vehicle environments, making it well suited to the limited hardware resources available.

Abstract

Modern intelligent vehicles have electronic control units containing firmware that enables various functions in the vehicle. New firmware versions are constantly developed to remove bugs and improve functionality. Automobile manufacturers have traditionally performed firmware updates over cables but in the near future they are aiming at conducting firmware updates over the air, which would allow faster updates and improved safety for the driver. In this paper, we present a protocol for secure firmware updates over the air. The protocol provides data integrity, data authentication, data confidentiality, and freshness. In our protocol, a hash chain is created of the firmware, and the first packet is signed by a trusted source, thus authenticating the whole chain. Moreover, the packets are encrypted using symmetric keys. We discuss the practical considerations that exist for implementing our protocol and show that the protocol is computationally efficient, has low memory overhead, and is suitable for wireless communication. Therefore, it is well suited to the limited hardware resources in the wireless vehicle environment.