A Policy-based Communications Architecture for Vehicles

Despite the fact that numerous studies have indicated that vehicular networks are vulnerable to external and internal attacks, very little effort has been expended in safeguarding communications both between elements within the vehicle and between the vehicle and the outside world. In this paper we present a mechanism that allows communications policy (essentially who can talk with whom and the security parameters of the channel) to be defined during the design of the software component and then adapted as the component undergoes integration first within subsystems and so on all the way to the final integration in the operational vehicle. We provide a mechanism that can maintain the integrity of the policy throughout the development effort and, finally, enforce the policy during the operation of the component in the production vehicle.