According to global research, the market share of highly automated, driverless vehicles is growing rapidly. Analysts estimate that the next 10 to 15 years will mark a major shift from pilot projects to the mass adoption of autonomous transport. The momentum is building worldwide: Europe has already rolled out over 35 autonomous vehicle pilots, while the U.S. and China log more than 450 000 and 250 000 commercial trips per week, respectively. However, the report notes several roadblocks slowing down this progress. One such hurdle is the uncertainty surrounding legal liability and regulation, including in the areas of safety and security. The allocation of responsibility among suppliers, manufacturers, enterprise clients, and end users remains a major point of discussion.
Each market stakeholder sees the issue of ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles differently. For automakers, it means taking responsibility for how a vehicle behaves on the road and for vetting their suppliers. For the suppliers themselves, it means designing security mechanisms directly into their solution architecture from day one and guaranteeing their adequacy. For insurance companies, it means completely overhauling their risk models to account for not just accidents, but also potential software glitches and cyberattacks. Ultimately, everyone agrees on one fundamental point: security must be a foundational feature of the vehicle — not an optional add-on.
For years, discussions around automotive safety focused strictly on functional safety. In other words, the goal was to ensure that vehicle systems operated correctly, and that risks associated with potential failures were fully mitigated or reduced to an acceptable level. The ISO 26262 standard “Road vehicles — Functional safety” helps address this very challenge, and serves as the baseline for the automotive industry.
However, the modern connected vehicle is a complex cyberphysical system that stores and processes massive amounts of data, including sensitive information. And this leads to the emergence of new basic needs. To draw an analogy with two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a modern vehicle must:
All of this means equipping vehicles with a wide array of interfaces — telematics, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular connectivity, OTA updates, and V2X — which opens the door to remote attacks. Therefore, it becomes necessary to ensure not only the functional security, but also the information security of the vehicle. As a result, specialized industry standards that help address automotive cybersecurity challenges have emerged in most countries. The key international standards are ISO/SAE 21434 “Road vehicles — Cybersecurity engineering”, UNECE R155, and UNECE R156.
China’s regulations are evolving too. In 2024, the country published the national standard GB 44495-2024 “Technical Requirements for Vehicle Cybersecurity”, which went into effect on January 1, 2026. The document introduces mandatory cybersecurity requirements for vehicles, including communications protection, security event management, threat monitoring, and secure vehicle interaction with external infrastructure.
Understanding and applying these standards is becoming absolutely critical. Research shows that cybersecurity risks are escalating daily, and their impact on functional safety can sometimes trigger far more dangerous incidents than an internal system failure. What happens if an attacker gains access to a self-driving truck’s remote-control system, or manages to reflash a critical electronic control unit during an unauthorized diagnostic session?
One of the key components for mitigating these scenarios is a security gateway, which isolates the vehicle’s architecture into different domains based on criticality, while providing secure routing, filtering, and traffic control. Developing this type of software solution is precisely what our team focuses on as we build the Kaspersky Automotive Secure Gateway based on KasperskyOS.
The primary purpose of Kaspersky Automotive Secure Gateway (KASG) is to secure the vehicle’s CAN domain, since the CAN bus is used to transmit a vast number of critical control commands. This impacts nearly 80% of the electronic control units inside the car, which handle engine management, braking, body electronics, and more. Because of this, we utilize the Safety-Aware Cybersecurity approach — a unified architecture that accounts for both functional safety and cybersecurity requirements.
For example, standard End-to-End Protection (E2E) mechanisms are typically used to mitigate risks associated with dropped, out-of-order, or corrupted CAN messages. However, these mechanisms were not originally designed to counter targeted cyberattacks. If an attacker manages to construct a malicious frame that conforms to the required E2E format, the system may accept it as valid.
This introduces a new factor: it’s critical not only to verify that a message was delivered without errors, but also to ensure that it was actually generated by a trusted electronic control unit (ECU), and was not altered in transit. This is particularly vital for transmitting control commands — such as those sent to the vehicle’s braking system — or for implementing keyless entry (NFC) systems.
To address that challenge, Secure Onboard Communication (SecOC) mechanisms are integrated into the vehicle’s architecture. They use cryptographic methods to verify message authenticity and integrity, protecting the system against message spoofing and replay attacks. KASG successfully implements these mechanisms, which, in addition to message verification, perform the crucial function of centralized key management. This allows encryption keys to be distributed and updated from a single point within the vehicle, reducing both the cost and the processing load on the ECUs involved in SecOC-backed data exchange.
However, in complex systems, it’s no longer enough to apply security mechanisms only to individual messages or separate network segments. It’s essential to provide vehicle-wide monitoring and control, tracking behavioral anomalies, unusual cross-domain interactions, and unauthorized tampering attempts. In the IT domain, this is known as an Intrusion Detection System (IDS). These systems have been successfully adopted by the automotive industry as well.
At the same time, it’s important to realize that for a modern vehicle, an IDS is not a single magic point of data collection and analysis; the vehicle requires a distributed monitoring system. Monitoring is carried out at various architectural levels: within domains, at the individual controller level, and at network boundaries.
The security gateway becomes a critical monitoring point because all cross-domain interaction passes through. Additionally, the gateway provides visibility into data exchange across different segments of the vehicle network. Its job is to detect deviations from normal behavior and generate security events.
When it comes to the CAN domain monitoring implemented in KASG, the IDS looks at the following criteria for traffic analysis:
In practice, however, an important limitation becomes clear: even with an onboard IDS, more context is required to determine the exact characteristics of an attack. Furthermore, when operating highly automated vehicles — where fleet-wide monitoring is essential — such isolated analysis becomes inherently insufficient.
Multi-object monitoring, data correlation, and data analysis can be efficiently handled externally — specifically in SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems, which are traditionally used in corporate and industrial cybersecurity operations centers. Therefore, utilizing a SIEM system fleet-wide is a logical step that makes it possible to:
When integrating with external SIEM systems, several critical tasks must be addressed: ensuring a secure connection, tuning the security event transmission process, and establishing baseline rules for event processing and correlation. We are actively working through all of these challenges using our own SIEM system — Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform — as a blueprint.
There are still many issues ahead that need to be resolved. This article covered only a fraction of the approaches currently used in KASG to ensure vehicle safety and security. Yet even this small part demonstrates that automotive security cannot be achieved by solving a single problem or applying a single mechanism. Achieving it requires an approach that enables methodical architecture development — balancing diverse requirements for vehicle functionality, security, and reliability.
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