Preventing memory errors in networked vehicle services through diversification

Car-to-X communication stands for the communication of different vehicles (vehicle-to-vehicle) as well as for the communication of vehicles and infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure). The development of these technologies promotes the emergence of new car infotainment and telematic services of added value for users. The side effect is the exposure of vehicles to a number of new threats, such as memory errors. Among other consequences, the exploitation of memory errors may lead to code-reuse attacks, where intruders reuse existing non-malicious
code with malicious purposes, such as gaining complete car control. Since memory error exploits usually rely on highly specific processor characteristics, the same exploit rarely works on dfferent hardware architectures. This paper proposes a strategy to thwart memory error exploitation by combining the diversification of HW through processor emulation with the creation of Service variants using offthe-shelf cross-compilation suites.