Secure over-the-air software update for connected vehicles

Current trends forecast that Over-the-Air (OTA) software updates will be highly significant for future connected vehicles. The OTA software updates will enable upgrading vehicle functionalities or bug fixations in embedded software installed on electronic control units remotely. However, in terms of security, OTA updates are highly critical as they need complete access to the in-vehicle communication network. Furthermore, scheduling OTA software updates at a massive scale over a cellular network is highly challenging. This paper proposes STRIDE, a novel technique for secure and scalable software updates using cloud through cellular network. STRIDE ensures end-to-end security using ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. To enable fast and reliable distribution of update package, we then propose a software update scheduling algorithm to serve dynamic traffic flow. Particularly, we integrate dynamic traffic flow with the Lyapunov-drift analysis framework, and establish throughput optimality of our proposed scheduling algorithm. We evaluate the performance of STRIDE through extensive experiments. Experimental results show that STRIDE reduces more than 52% computation and storage overheads, 60% propagation delay and increases throughput by 35% than the state-of-the-art solutions, in addition to enjoying the stronger security properties.