09.10.2012 13:46

Contributed article from Alan Grau, Icon Labs featured at Automotive Electronics news - Insight for Engineers. How to protect cars form hackers and web attacks. Protecting automotive systems from hackers with an embedded firewall. 

Blocking attacks with a firewall

By controlling which packets or messages are processed by the device, a firewall provides a basic, but critical level of security. In a system without a firewall, a hacker may attempt to remotely access the device using default passwords, dictionary attacks, stolen passwords, or other attack.  Such attacks are often automated, allowing a huge number of attempts to break the system’s security.  The same system, with an embedded firewall configured with a whitelist of trusted hosts, will block the attack. Packets from the hacker will be blocked by the firewall because the IP address is not on the trusted senders list.  The firewall blocks packets before they are passed to the application to attempt to login.

Separate rules are set up for a car’s infotainment systems, ensuring maximum protection for critical systems while maintaining usability for driver and passenger systems.  The rules for the infotainment system would allow the user to access general sites on the Internet, while blocking unwanted traffic from reaching the car’s control systems.

johndayautomotivelectronics.com