Panasonic and Trend Micro team to bring security to driverless cars

NEWSBYTE: Panasonic and Trend Micro have announced a new cybersecurity partnership to develop solutions that prevent cyber-attacks against autonomous and connected cars.

The team-up aims to develop technologies to detect and prevent intrusions into electronic control units (ECUs) – the computer systems that manage driving behaviours such as acceleration, steering, and braking – as well as into in-vehicle infotainment devices, navigation systems, and telematics devices.

The firms said that the risk of hackers taking control of steering and braking systems in connected cars are real. New security vulnerabilities are discovered every day, posing a risk of remote exploitation.

The collaboration will use Panasonic’s Control Area Network (CAN) intrusion detection and prevention technology, to detect unauthorised commands sent to ECUs.

It will also deploy Trend Micro IoT Security, a solution for embedded devices that connect with IP communications outside the vehicle. The technology accesses Trend Micro’s global security intelligence and malware analysis functions.

Events identified by both systems will be collated and sent to a new analysis platform in the cloud to detect and block any suspicious data traffic.

Last year, Trend Micro said that manufacturers can only mitigate attacks on cars by adopting specific network countermeasures: “To eliminate the risk entirely, an updated CAN standard should be proposed, adopted, and implemented.”

This process is likely to require a new generation of vehicles, said Trend Micro senior threat researcher Federico Maggi at the time.

Internet of Business says

A welcome addition to autonomous vehicles’ security armoury, as real-world tests of driverless cars, trucks, and unmanned aerial vehicles become commonplace.

The need for autonomous vehicle security is overwhelming, and has been obvious ever since IBM white-hat hackers were able to disable a driverless car’s brakes using a hacked MP3 file a few years ago. However, whether cloud-based systems will be fast enough to cope in time-critical situations is a different matter. Split-second decisions are best made in the dynamic edge environment.