An Optimized Over-the-Air Software Update Framework Based on Uptane for Automobiles

Autonomous driving, connected vehicles, electrification of the powertrain, and shared mobility lead to the rapid increasing of the complexity of automotive electronic system, and the functional safety and cyber-security problems of the automotive electronic system cause a serial of recalls frequently, which is resulting in a huge economic loss and user experience decline of the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). The over-the-air (OTA) update technology uses wireless network to achieve remote update of software and firmware in scenarios such as automatic driving function update, on-board software update and on-board safety system upgrade, thus avoiding the adverse impact of recall, but how to guarantee the cyber-security and efficient implementation of the OTA processes is a key problem needing to be resolved by auto industry. The opensource Uptane framework is an industry reference specification for OTA, but it has some cyber-security vulnerabilities and brings too large system overhead for its current reference implementation. By choosing efficient hash and signature algorithms and introducing a new verification mechanism based on alliance chain, an optimized Uptane framework is proposed with reduced resource and time overhead and increased cyber-security. The prototype implementation verifies the cyber-security of the optimized Uptane framework, and by comparing with the original Uptane framework, the memory consumption and delay overhead of the optimized Uptane framework are reduced by 6.9% and 28.6%, respectively.