Analysis of a Secure Software Upload Technique in Advanced Vehicles using Wireless Links

Software modules of an advanced vehicle can be updated using remote software upload (RSU) techniques. The RSU employs infrastructure-based wireless communication technique where the software supplier sends the software to the targeted vehicle via a roadside base station (BS). However, security is critically important in RSU to avoid any disasters due to malfunctions of the vehicle or to protect the proprietary algorithms from hackers, competitors or people with malicious intent. In this paper, we present a mechanism of secure software upload in an advanced vehicle. In order to increase the security level, we propose the vehicle to receive two copies of the software along with the message digest (MD) in each copy. The vehicle will install the new software only when it receives two identical copies of the software. To validate our proposition we find analytical expressions of average number of packet transmissions for successful software update. We investigate different cases depending on the vehicle´s buffer size and verification methods. Our analytical and simulation results show that it is sufficient to send two copies of software to the vehicle to thwart any security attack while uploading the software.