Cybersecurity has risen in importance as the automotive industry undergoes a transformation driven by new personal-mobility concepts, autonomous driving, vehicle electrification, and car connectivity.
Today’s cars have up to 150 electronic control units; by 2030, many observers expect them to have roughly 300 million lines of software code. By way of comparison, today’s cars have about 100 million lines of code.
To put that into perspective, a passenger aircraft has an estimated 15 million lines of code, a modern fighter jet about 25 million, and a mass-market PC operating system close to 40 million.
This overabundance of complex software code results from both the legacy of designing electronics systems in specific ways for the past 35 years and the growing requirements and increasing complexity of systems in connected and autonomous cars.
As with all other areas of advanced digital technology, the interconnected nature of contemporary automotive engineering generates ample opportunity for cyber-attacks—not only in the car but also along the entire value chain.
In reality, cybersecurity is becoming a new dimension of quality for automobiles. The cyber risk of connected cars has become clear with security researchers revealing various technical vulnerabilities. In these cases, the attackers disclosed their findings to OEMs to help them fix the issues before malicious attackers caused harm.
Cybersecurity professionals overwhelmingly want to see automotive players deploy cybersecurity over the entire product life cycle and not just up to when the car is sold to a customer.
There’s also a call for tighter standards and guidelines for specific technical procedures for securing hardware and software in vehicles, such as standards for hardware encryption or secure communication among electronic control units (ECUs).
In response, regulators have begun to take action to address the growing vulnerabilities in connected car data security. For example, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) is working on regulations to improve automotive cybersecurity and software update management.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers Automotive Cybersecurity Training, a 3-day course where participants discuss fundamentals of embedded systems and applications of cybersecurity in vehicles to illustrate unique vulnerabilities that are commonly exploited.
Automotive Cybersecurity Training covers all aspects of cybersecurity within the context of road vehicles.
Additionally, Tonex offers nearly three dozen more courses in Cybersecurity Foundation. This includes cutting edge courses like:
—Cybersecurity Fundamentals (2 days)
—Electric Grid Cybersecurity Master Certification (4 weeks)
—Network Security Training (2 days)