Vehicle Root of Trust - Cryptography and Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity of modern automotive systems is a growing concern.  Modern vehicles continue to rapidly grow in functionality to support autonomous driving, electrification, and advanced user interfaces.  Cyber-attacks on commercial vehicles could result in significant safety, privacy, and availability issues.  Military vehicles have additional concerns.  They have to function in contested environments targeted by advanced cyber threats, be modified over their life-cycle with additional subsystems from multiple vendors, and be easily maintained to ensure readiness.  To prepare for these challenges, the Army has developed the neXtECU to act as a primary component of military vehicle electrical systems.  The neXtECU incorporates a Hardware Security Module (HSM) which can be configured for use as a Root of Trust (RoT).  A RoT can provide system security protections and assured cryptographic functions to support many different vehicle applications.  The RoT can support secure functions such as: working with the bootloader to authenticate system software ensuring a boot to a known secure state, protecting confidentiality of cryptographic keys, providing accelerated cryptographic functions for secure protocols, and cryptographic signing providing integrity protection of vehicle information including audit records/security logs.  During the proposed Phase I program, a Vehicle Root of Trust (VRoT) will be designed for the neXtECU.  The VRoT will provide a secure software stack which leverages the HSM incorporated into the NXP MPC5777M microcontroller (MCU) used in the neXtECU.  The VRoT design, inspired by automotive architectures including AUTOSAR, will incorporate three main elements: HSM Driver, HSM Application Programmer’s Interface (API), and HSM Secure Protocols.  Secmation is teamed with North Carolina State University leveraging their R&D capabilities in cybersecurity threat analysis, simulation, and electric vehicle design.  Secmation’s experience working with DoD organizations to implement cryptographic and cybersecurity solutions in embedded applications using NXP devices provides a solid foundation for the proposed program.