Analysis and Evaluation of Hardware Trust Anchors in the Automotive Domain

Automotive architectures get increasingly more complex both regarding internal as well as external connections to offer new services like autonomous driving. This development further broadens the cyberattack surface of modern vehicles. As mitigation mechanism, hardware trust anchors (HTAs) are increasingly integrated into the electronic control units (ECUs) of modern vehicles to shield security-sensitive data like cryptographic keys against a variety of cyberattacks. However, the provided security capabilities differ among the HTAs. There is currently no evaluation of the HTAs that also addresses current and emerging future requirements of the automotive domain. Thus, in this work, we will analyze and evaluate typical automotive HTAs regarding their feasibility to be used in modern and upcoming vehicle architectures. For this we derive comprehensive evaluation criteria from both related work as well as the automotive domain analysis and make an extensive assessment of the HTA properties in accordance to requirements of the automotive domain.