Automotive Ethernet: security opportunity or challenge?

The automotive industry’s future trends, such as automated driving or advanced driver assistance, require large bandwidths to handle massive data streams and strongly depend on well timed communication. The Ethernet technology is seen as a suitable candidate to cover those needs for vehicle-internal networks; however, Ethernet involves security issues. Thus, by discussing automotive Ethernet attributes with regard to the adaption of existing security mechanisms in contrast to the potential of creating new ones, several challenges and opportunities emerge in consideration of comparatively fewer available resources and the integration into a vehicle environment. Based on these results we derive and propose ideas for manipulation and misuse detection mechanisms.