Emerging Security Risks in Automotive System-on-Chips (SoCs): A Comprehensive Review

Authors

  • Sujan Hiregundagal Gopal Rao

Keywords:

Automotive cybersecurity, System-on-Chip (SoC), hardware security, connected vehicles, ADAS, secure automotive electronics

Abstract

The transformation of modern vehicles into highly connected and software-driven systems has positioned System-on-Chips (SoCs) as a central element of automotive innovation. Automotive SoCs combine heterogeneous processing cores, accelerators, memory subsystems, and communication interfaces to support safety-critical functionalities such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous driving, infotainment, and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. While this high level of integration improves performance and cost efficiency, it also gives rise to new and increasingly complex security challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive review of emerging security risks affecting automotive SoCs, encompassing hardware-based attacks, software and firmware vulnerabilities, network-oriented exploits, and systemic risks associated with over-the-air updates and AI-driven workloads. By synthesizing recent academic and industrial research, the paper identifies dominant attack vectors, shortcomings of existing protection mechanisms, and open challenges that remain unresolved. The goal is to provide both researchers and practitioners with a structured perspective on the evolving threat landscape and to outline directions for security-aware SoC design.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17762/ijisae.v10i3s.8001

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Wolf, M., Weimerskirch, A., & Paar, C. (2021). Security in automotive bus systems. Proceedings of the IEEE, 109(3), 343–356.

Checkoway, S., et al. (2011). Comprehensive experimental analyses of automotive attack surfaces. USENIX Security Symposium, 77–92.

Sanwald, T., et al. (2020). Secure boot mechanisms in automotive ECUs. IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, 12(2), 45–48.

Eisenbarth, T., et al. (2019). On the power of power analysis in embedded systems. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 68(1), 3–16.

Tehranipoor, M., & Wang, C. (2017). Introduction to hardware security and trust. Springer.

Mangard, S., Oswald, E., & Popp, T. (2007). Power analysis attacks. Springer.

Nilsson, D., Larson, U., & Jonsson, E. (2018). Securing vehicle OTA updates. Computer, 51(7), 38–47.

Hoppe, T., Kiltz, S., & Dittmann, J. (2011). Security threats to automotive CAN networks. Automotive Safety & Security, 235–248.

Eykholt, K., et al. (2018). Robust physical-world attacks on machine learning models. CVPR, 1625–1634.

Studnia, I., et al. (2020). Survey on intrusion detection in automotive networks. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 22(4), 2474–2509.

ISO/SAE. (2021). ISO/SAE 21434: Road vehicles — Cybersecurity engineering.

Sommer, R., & Paxson, V. (2010). Outside the closed world: IDS challenges. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 305–316.

Chattopadhyay, A., et al. (2022). Security-aware SoC design for automotive systems. ACM TODAES, 27(4), 1–29.

Downloads

Published

30.12.2022

How to Cite

Sujan Hiregundagal Gopal Rao. (2022). Emerging Security Risks in Automotive System-on-Chips (SoCs): A Comprehensive Review. International Journal of Intelligent Systems and Applications in Engineering, 10(3s), 467–471. Retrieved from https://ijisae.org/index.php/IJISAE/article/view/8001

Issue

Section

Research Article