Cybersecurity Industry Perspective on Vehicle Safety Management and Ethernet Architecture

Automotive IQ interviewed Ian Riches, Director Global Automotive Practices, at Strategy Analytics. He talks about the current market outlook for BUS technologies, Ethernet in ADAS systems and cyber security aspects of vehicle network architectures. Mr. Riches, where are the trends going in terms of bus technologies and networks? In terms of vehicle electronics, the three fastest growth areas are in electrified powertrains for hybrid vehicles, electric vehicles, plugins, etc. Then there are all of the ADAS technologies moving towards more highly automated driving, meaning anything involving cameras, radars, LIDARS, and in getting the vehicle connected. Automotive IQ: We are currently living in the very early stage of the connected car. At the same time, getting the car more connected opens it up potentially to more threats. The cars do need to get connected. It’s a slightly double-edged sword for many vehicle manufacturers, in that vehicle security and cybersecurity have become such a huge issue with the Fiat Chrysler hack, and in one sense it could have been anybody. You could say Fiat Chrysler were unlucky in that they were chosen, because they’re not particularly worse than anyone else. The sad thing about it was that somebody was able to hack remotely into the vehicle, but the only way that Fiat Chrysler could fix it was by recalling that vehicle to the dealer or by posting the driver a USB stick. So it could be broken from the other side of the world, but to fix it you had to sit in the car. That is a business model which is to us fundamentally broken at the moment. We see with our computers, there are always threats, there are always vulnerabilities. How should automakers respond to that challenge? You cannot design the perfect complete system. What you have to have is a system that can be fixed when those vulnerabilities have been found – and fixed quickly. That doesn’t mean recalling it to a dealer or posting a USB stick, it means doing it over the air. The vehicle has to be fully connected with a relatively high bandwidth connection so that you’re not dribbling the data over a 2.5G modem but can actually send it out quickly. [inlinead] If we look at the implementation of Automotive Ethernet today, Ethernet is growing rapidly right now, but still it’s a fraction of the total. How come? There’s a whole mass of vehicles made in the world, everything from very basic vehicles with little more than an engine management system up to your luxury German sedans, your S-Class, 7 series or A8, etc. So we do see significant growth for Ethernet, but that’s not at the expense of others. We’re still seeing growth for CAN, for LIN, for all these other protocols out there as well. You have to remember the two things – yes, Ethernet is growing very quickly into a number of applications, but it’s not going to be on every car tomorrow because for relatively simple cars, the use case just isn’t there yet. The pricing is too expensive and the automotive industry tends to be a little bit conservative. It’s a big decision point: Do I need to put it in this car? Do I need to take that risk? What benefit do I get? And for a mass market vehicle at the moment, our view is that that sort of analysis is favoring doing it the old way for another model generation, to see what happens. What is your estimation for the demand of Ethernet? Any particular fast growing markets? In terms of general production, we have to place Ethernet demand in context. The fastest growth markets and the fastest growth vehicle types are tending to be at the lower end. It’s not that a European consumer is buying their second, third, fourth car, it’s that an Indian consumer is buying their first car, only having had a motorbike or a scooter beforehand. So again we need to be realistic about the short and medium-term demand for Ethernet. We’re perhaps unlikely to see very low-cost Ethernet cars, certainly this side of 2020 and even beyond. One of the most important drivers for Ethernet are cameras and sensor technology. Cameras generate a huge amount of data, and particularly interesting is that resolution is going up as well, so the cameras are generating even more data. Engineers generally love to work with the raw data: give me the full signal, give me everything, I want to see it all. If you’re doing any form of central processing away from exactly where the camera is, that means you need a high-bandwidth link between that camera and the central processor. That link can’t be CAN and it can’t be FlexRay. They’re just not fast enough. Some would say that even the current single gigabit per second probably isn’t fast enough; we need multiple gigabits per second if you want multiple high-resolution camera streams to process centrally. That’s what engineers like: it’s just a case of when that becomes affordable for a certain feature set on a certain class of car. Where do you see the most potential for Ethernet cyber security? As you get to more and more automated driving, you actually need to have much more availability of the steering and braking, etc. because there isn’t necessarily that fallback to the driver taking control, or at least not so quickly. So, you need a lot more robustness in those systems, which again can drive up bandwidth requirements, as can the actual deterministic nature of the network knowing that the message has been sent and received. That’s all not standard within CAN, shall we say. Whereas today a steering system might run quite happily on CAN, the steering system for a highly automated vehicle may well be looking at Ethernet to provide that overall security and guarantee the feature availability as much as possible. Secondly, and I mentioned cybersecurity earlier, the potential for sorting that problem out within conventional CAN networks is limited by the bandwidth of the network. Any overhead you put on those CAN messages means that there’s less room for the messages because you’ve put a security overhead on there. Many CAN networks on vehicles today are reaching that kind of saturation point: how much more data can we fit on that bus? And if you start adding security on top of that, you’ve got a headache. Now CAN FD certainly has a role to play there, but if you’re more adventurous, Ethernet’s there also. Do you expect Ethernet to be the backbone of the communication network by around 2020? We see obviously that it’s starting to come out in luxury vehicle makers. My modelling at the moment assumes it will be part of the relatively lower volume platforms of perhaps two luxury carmakers by at least 2020. How could automakers speed up the implementation of Ethernet? Generally, for automotive technologies to become mainstream, one or more of three things need to happen. Firstly, if it’s more cost effective than the old way of doing it, it happens. That will take quite a while for Ethernet at the moment, but it will happen one day. The second reason why new technologies become standard is because effectively a mandate or law changes, and the only way to meet the new regulation is to fit the new technology. There’s nothing immediate that’s going to do that for Ethernet, but there’s no law as such for automated driving: the safety standard requirement sort of fills that role. To imagine highly automated driving without Ethernet is a very difficult thing. Finally, if a certain feature becomes so compelling that you think that your customer really wants and needs this feature, almost regardless of the cost. I know I can get that cost back by gaining market share by selling that feature. We’re not quite there yet for Ethernet and some features, but because of the fact that even on low-end cars in Europe we have autonomous emergency braking and lane-departure warning available, for the likes of the German luxury carmakers, they’re going to have to keep pushing the envelope, moving towards automated drive and closing that gap, so they’re going to be needing those features. I think it’s an exciting time to see how this is going to evolve, slowly but surely. "Surely" is certain: I’m not so sure about "slowly". In automotive terms, the growth I’m forecasting is actually quite fast, but the numbers today are so small for multiple carmakers in terms of comparing it to CAN nodes or LIN nodes, it’s still going to be a very junior cousin to CAN or LIN for many years to come. But the growth rate is absolutely there. Mr. Riches, thank you very much.

Cybersecurity Industry Perspective on Vehicle Safety Management and Ethernet Architecture

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