Enabling safe & secure modular UPdates, UPgrades and DynAmic Task reallocation and Execution for Software Defined Vehicles

ongoing

UP2DATE4SDV has brought together automotive hardware manufacturers, the automotive software industry and SMEs, and the best-known researchers in the field to jointly create a comprehensive ecosystem for updatable, upgradable, and reconfigurable software-defined connected and automated vehicles. To this end, a middleware solution is to be created and integrated into the current automotive open source standards, which allows complete abstraction not only of the software running in the vehicle, but also of the installed hardware. As a result, not only can the software be continuously updated over the air over the lifetime of the vehicle and thus kept safe, secure, and up to date, but hardware components can also be easily replaced or supplemented to meet future requirements. To achieve this, we will additionally develop a new hardware component based on established automotive systems, which will be expanded in such a way that the unavoidable overhead resulting from the update capability of the systems is minimised thanks to explicit hardware support. The overall solution is suitable for the upcoming zonal E/E architectures that have a permanent connection to the cloud. The project therefore aims to develop and integrate methods that ensure the safety of the systems during an update by strictly separating all individual automotive applications in containers. In addition, a security layer will be introduced to prevent attacks via the cloud link or among the application modules. Finally, we want to make it easier for automotive software developers to use our middleware by establishing a reference layer based on a hypervisor that prevents the real-time requirements of different application modules from influencing each other. Communication to the vehicle components and to the cloud is abstracted and standardised. In addition, methods are provided to automate the V&V process for each further update, upgrade or reconfiguration and to ensure security at every step.