Blockchain tech could stop connected car cyber-threat: Carleton prof

OTTAWA — So-called Sybil attacks are a significant potential cybersecurity challenge to when it comes to autonomous and connected car technology, a demonstration at Carleton University outlined Thursday. With the shift to Canadian transportation relying on digital information, that sort of attack is increasingly a concern, said Richard Yu, the professor at Carleton's School of Information Technology who is leading the connected vehicle research at the university. He was speaking at an event held a few meters from the Rideau Canal, where two groups of graduate students demonstrated projects running proof of concept connected vehicle hardware and software. The demos included a test where the students simulated a cyber attack in which the car detects other vehicles that don’t actually exist. “Suddenly, we have many cars around you and all of them are police cars or ambulances,” said Yu. This is known as a Sybil attack, named after the famous case study about a woman who was believed to have multiple personality disorder. “Once you can do a Sybil attack, you can do many different things,” he said in a follow up interview. “You can change the messages, you can change your identity . You can change other information and you can even change a red light to green light. It's really dangerous.” Security was a concern in recent report from a Senate committee, which recommended that federal groups like Transport Canada, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and Public Safety work together to track and mitigate emerging cybersecurity risks to network-connected cars. In the future, wireless signals will be used for communication between vehicles and infrastructure like stop lights and lamp posts, so that cars can know what’s coming around blind corners and the location of other cars on the road. Thursday’s tests ran over Cohda Wireless Pty Ltd. dedicated short range communications (DSRC) equipment used by the university. As the demo proceeded, a visualization for the audience showed a map of the campus with the location of the real car. When the attack was enabled, false indicators that the original car would understand to be other vehicles instantly appeared. The students at Carleton have developed a system which authenticates the information being transmitted by the cars. Using distributed ledgers, a technology similar to a blockchain, Yu’s team created what could be considered a whitelist, or a set of pre-approved identities which can’t be changed that would filter out any fake personas. Once that filter was turned on during the test, the false cars disappeared from the visualization map. More robust solutions in the future could rely on certificate authorities like websites do today, or public key cryptography (shared encryption which is difficult hard to break), but Yu did admit it’s still early days. “This is only the beginning of our research, the first of several months. We have two years to go,” he said. Yu and his team received a $600,000 federal grant to do 5G testing at the university in February 2017, as well as $974,000 for connected vehicle research, according to a news release published in October. — With reporting by Bryson Masse at bmasse@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Blockchain tech could stop connected car cyber-threat: Carleton prof

News | April 12, 2018

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Blockchain tech could stop connected car cyber-threat: Carleton prof

News | April 12, 2018

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