Blockchain Based Security Repository for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Connected and self-driving cars have emerged over the last decade as a leading example of cyber-physical systems, which seek to considerably enhance traffic safety, reduce emissions, decrease costs, and improve efficiency. Autonomous vehicles can have a large codebase and a large volume of messages exchanged. The concepts of connected driving, cooperative driving, and intelligent transportation systems increase the connectivity of vehicles to the Internet or other cloud services. High connectivity, misconfiguration, and insecure coding widen the attack surface of autonomous vehicles. Despite the predictions and assumptions made with regard to the security implications of AVs, there are some limitations that should be considered. One of the limitations refers to the failure to present all existing risks pertaining to the functioning of Autonomous Vehicle (AV)s. Providing assurance for the security of autonomous vehicles is difficult with the absence of defined threats and a security testing approach.
To address the lack of test case repositories for autonomous vehicles, this research presents a trustworthy blockchain-based test case repository for the security testing of autonomous vehicles. The proposed blockchain system aims to establish a decentralized security testing repository to organize security testing efforts in the field of autonomous vehicle security. The proposed repository approach incorporates a distributed trust management system to manage the reputations of authors and test cases. In this research, we also introduced a reference model for autonomous vehicles to support the development of test cases for repositories.
Our blockchain-based repository was implemented using Hyperledger Fabric, a blockchain technology with a distributed trust management system and data storage. The performance of the proposed implementation was evaluated using a blockchain benchmark tool called Hyperledger Caliper. The number of transactions and throughput were measured for different numbers of nodes, test cases, repository sizes, and different approaches for data storage. The distributed data storage approach showed a higher throughput and number of successful transactions compared to on-chain data storage.
This thesis contributes to the security of autonomous vehicles in two ways. It introduces the autonomous vehicle reference model to establish a baseline for the components involved in the security of autonomous vehicles and to support the development of test case-based security testing. The reference model aims at organizing the efforts in the security testing of autonomous vehicles by outlining the main components involved with respect to the security of autonomous vehicles. The thesis also proposes a blockchain-based approach to support test-based security testing for autonomous vehicles. The blockchain-based approach incorporates the concept of distributed trust to ensure the trustworthiness of the test cases added to the repository. Furthermore, the thesis contributes to the broader field of autonomous vehicle security by reviewing and analyzing recent cybersecurity threats to modern autonomous vehicles. This highlights the importance of security testing for autonomous vehicles.

Date of Award	Apr 2023
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Chan Yeun (Supervisor)