An Overview of Automotive Service-oriented Architectures and Implications for Security Countermeasures

New requirements from the customers’ and manufacturers’ point of view such as adding new software functions during the product life cycle require a transformed architecture design for future vehicles. The paradigm of signal-oriented communication established for many years will increasingly be replaced by service-oriented approaches in order to increase the update and upgrade capability. In this article, we provide an overview of current protocols and communication patterns for automotive architectures based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm and compare them with signal-oriented approaches. Resulting challenges and opportunities of SOAs with respect to information security are outlined and discussed. For this purpose, we explain different security countermeasures and present a state of the section of automotive approaches in the fields of firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) and Identity and Access Management (IAM). Our final discussion is based on an exemplary hybrid architecture (signal- and service-oriented) and examines the adaptation of existing security measures as well as their specific security features.