Roadblocks on the Highway to Secure Cars: An Exploratory Survey on the Current Safety and Security Practice of the Automotive Industry

With various advances in technology, cars evolved to highly interconnected and complex Cyber-Physical Systems. Due to this development, the security of involved components and systems needs to be addressed in a rigorous way. The resulting necessity of combining safety and security aspects during the development processes has proven to be non-trivial due to the high interference between these aspects and their respective treatment. This paper discusses the results of an exploratory survey on how organizations from the automotive industry in the Euroregion tackle the challenge of integrating safety and security aspects during system development. The observed state of practice shows that there are significant deficits in the integration of both domains. The results of the exploratory survey enabled us to identify the most common challenges of realizing an integrated approach in a practical setting and discuss implications for future research.