MASSiF - Developing safe software for vehicles

The importance of software in vehicles has been increasing for years. While there are many methods to ensure safety in the development of software for vehicles, security was not considered with the same intensity until recently, even though hackers managed to remotely take over and control a vehicle (Jeep Cherokee) as early as 2015. At the end of 2021, a standard was adopted in the form of ISO 21434, which prescribes a security development lifecycle for vehicles.
In the project Model-based Assurance of Security and Safety for Environment-based Vehicle Functions (MASSiF), models have been developed since 2019 to automatically generate security test cases for software in vehicles. The test system generates attacks automatically based on a database of attack modules as well as on an existing system model and the characteristics of the attacker. A special focus of the project is the interaction of functional safety and information security in the development of vehicles.

The security part of the MASSiF project is led by Professor Hans-Joachim Hof. Professor Hof heads the "Security in Mobility" research group at the CARISSMA Institute of Electric, Connected, and Secure Mobility. The research group regularly offers exciting theses. If you are interested, please contact Professor Hof (hof@thi.de).