The Automotive Top 5: Applying the Critical Controls to the Modern Automobile

The car of today is an inherently vulnerable platform. At its core is a computing architecture from the 1980s which was designed to be lightweight and efficient, with very little thought given to security. As the modern automobile becomes increasingly connected, its attack surface only continues to grow. In the wake of several recent high- profile car hacking demonstrations, automakers face the daunting task of trying to lock down this insecure platform with bolt-on security fixes. This paper proposes a plausible strategy for securing modern automotive systems which takes into account some of the key limitations of the automobile industry, in addition to presenting a methodology for applying the Critical Controls to the modern automobile platform.