Sectigo Releases Embedded Firewall to Protect Automotive Systems

By Tiera Oliver

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

December 19, 2019

News

Part of the Sectigo IoT Identity Platform, the new product was developed for transportation security.

To protect vehicles from cyberattacks, Sectigo, a commercial Certificate Authority and a provider of purpose-built and automated PKI management solutions, released the Sectigo Embedded Firewall for Automotive. The new Sectigo Embedded Firewall for Automotive is a security solution that has been embedded within automotive ECUs to provide anomaly detection, stateful packet inspection, rules-based filtering, and threshold-based filtering.

According to the company, by 2022, more than two-thirds of new cars on American roads will have online connections to their safety-critical system, putting them at risk of deadly hacks (Consumer Watchdog report, July 2019) to vehicles' "head" system, used primarily for infotainment, GPS navigation, and other features.

Part of the Sectigo IoT Identity Platform, the new product was developed for transportation security. To speed adoption-and security-across the automotive supply chain, Mentor, a Siemens business, a technology company in embedded software and electronic design automation (EDA), has integrated the Sectigo Embedded Firewall for Automotive with its popular AUTOSAR platform.

Protecting Automotive ECUs Through IoT Authentication

To protect from these attacks, automotive manufacturers need an embedded firewall to control traffic into the exposed electronic control units (ECUs) in a vehicle, similar to how a firewall protects home and corporate networks. Embedded firewalls help prevent access from outside cyberattacks on a car's electronics, while still enabling authenticated access for software upgrades and updates.

By protecting ECUs such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), steering, braking, etc. from attack, the firewall prevents access from outside cyberattacks on a car's electronics, while enabling access to upgrades and updates. The firewall:
• Works with AUTOSAR, Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) and Linux to configure filtering rules
• Offers deep packet inspection for industrial protocols, including CAN bus
• Meets the requirements of automotive systems by enforcing defined security policies, limiting communication with vehicle control systems to a small set of trusted hosts, and blocking attacks from any other source. 

For more information, please visit: https://sectigo.com/

Tiera Oliver, Associate Editor for Embedded Computing Design, is responsible for web content edits, product news, and constructing stories. She also assists with newsletter updates as well as contributing and editing content for ECD podcasts and the ECD YouTube channel. Before working at ECD, Tiera graduated from Northern Arizona University where she received her B.S. in journalism and political science and worked as a news reporter for the university’s student led newspaper, The Lumberjack.

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