Our customer is an automotive tier-1 specializing in innovative solutions around mechatronics of automobiles. Some of the leading OEMs around the globe trust them for their sophisticated solutions.
As the industry is fast embracing automotive cybersecurity, our customer has been one of the earliest adopters of cybersecurity standards and practices. Partnering with us takes their commitment to automotive cybersecurity to newer heights.
The primary challenge for our customer was to develop a secure bootloader that could flash/reprogram the ECU (control unit). There was a certain level of cybersecurity required for the ECU that entailed numerous security implementations including digital signature.
Here’s a snapshot of the major challenges that needed to be addressed:
Since the customer needed a faster time-to-market for their solution, they partnered with us for bootloader development and other solutions. We have a proven track record of delivering secure bootloaders for automotive ECUs.
Our automotive team was primarily tasked with the development of a secure bootloader that would interact with the Hardware Security Module (HSM) of the ECU and ensure secure ECU flashing. In the process, the image(.hex/.srec) file and the digital signature will be validated with the HSM.
Additionally, the project scope also included developing a ‘gateway’ to facilitate flashing of 2 microcontrollers. Since the ECU had two variants- CAN and LIN, we had to develop bootloaders for both networks.
To facilitate secure ECU flashing, our customer requested us to develop a signing tool that would encrypt the image (.hex/.srec) file based on algorithms required by the customer.
The team started to work parallelly on these three applications.
Details of the solutions built for the customer:
Gateway proved to be a critical piece of solution to build especially in a 2 MCU environment. The gateway must ensure that the number of bytes of data sent to MCU 2 is received without any loss. Also, the data sent to MCU 2 through the gateway must be validated through HSM. Hence, reliability is the key here. We tested the communication rigorously to rule out any discrepancies.
Other Deliverables provided to the customer:
Due to our expertise in secure bootloader development, we could complete the project in the strict timeline provided by the customer. Our ready-to-integrate network and diagnostics stacks such as CAN, LIN and UDS also helped save considerable amount of time.
Vector CANoe: Used for validation of the secure bootloader
Vflash tool: ECU reprogramming sequence was validated using Vflash tool
Microchip Compiler Environment MPLab IDE- Used for development and debugging
Tessy Tool: Used for unit testing