Future perspectives: The car and its IP-address - A potential safety and security risk assessment

The fast growing Internet technology has affected many areas of human life. As it offers a convenient and widely accepted approach for communication and service distribution it is expected to continue its influence to future system design. Motivated from this successful spreading we assume hypothetical scenarios in our paper, whereby automotive components might also be influenced by omnipresent communication in near future. If such a development would take place it becomes important to investigate the influence to security and safety aspects. Based on today's wide variety of Internet based security attacks our goal is therefore to simulate and analyze potential security risks and their impact to safety constraints when cars would become equipped and connected with an IP based protocol via unique IP addresses. Therefore, our work should motivate the inserting of security mechanisms into the design, implementation and configuration of the car IT systems from the beginning of the development, which we substantiate by practical demo attacks on recent automotive technology.