Industry Expert Blogs

A specification for providing hardware root of trust is evolving to serve the need to secure tomorrow's automobiles.

Modern automotive vehicles rely on hundreds of sensors and electronic control units (ECUs) that may need to communicate through gateways with external systems such as a remote monitoring center at a manufacturer, a government traffic management system or various devices in the Internet of Things. The increasing complexity and connectivity to external networks make cars ever more vulnerable to attacks that could compromise passenger safety such as a hacker disrupting the steering controls of an automobile.

As software upgrades currently account for half of all automotive vehicle recalls, enabling and assuring secure remote vehicle software upgrades would be more convenient for consumers and less expensive for manufacturers than the hands-on approach most commonly used today.