Meet Lea Zimmerli

As most IoT systems today, autonomous vehicle systems were not built with security in mind. With their variety of communication channels and use cases, they provide a big attack surface and consequently, they are at risk to be exploited.

To address these problems, my master’s thesis is combining the knowledge from IoT cyber security and adapts them to fit the needs of autonomous vehicle systems. More precisely, the goal of this work is to enhance the overall security and with that, the overall resilience of the LAUV. To do so, a systematic security analysis following the OWASP threat modelling guidelines is performed on the LAUV, also considering the security reference model from the NATO IST-164 Task Group to also cover the potential military use case of it. This will help to elaborate security requirements and measures whereof some will be implemented eventually.

This work aims to raise awareness for security issues in autonomous vehicle systems.  By doing a threat analysis with the help of well-known methodologies for IoT systems, but also taking into account the particular characteristics of autonomous vehicle systems, the analysis is thorough yet flexible enough to be adapted to other use cases. In that sense, it shall provide a reference model for others facing the same problem.