Viktor Friesen

An access control concept for novel automotive HMI systems

The relevance of graphical functions in vehicular applications has increased significantly during the few last years. Modern cars are equipped with multiple displays used by different applications such as speedometer or navigation system. However, so far applications are restricted to using dedicated displays. In order to increase flexibility, the requirement of sharing displays between applications has emerged. Sharing displays leads to safety and security concerns since safety-critical applications as the dashboard warning lights share the same displays with uncritical or untrusted applications like the navigation system or third-party applications. To guarantee the safe and secure sharing of displays, we present a formal model for defining and controlling the access to display areas in this paper. We prove the validity of this model, and present a proof-of-concept implementation to demonstrate the feasibility of our concept.

Context-Aware Access Control in Novel Automotive HMI Systems

The growing relevance of vehicular applications like media player, navigation system, or speedometer using graphical presentation has lead to an increasing number of displays in modernf cars. This effectuates the desire for flexible sharing of all the available displays between several applications. However, automotive requirements include many regulations to avoid driver distraction to ensure safety. To allow for safe sharing of the available screen surface between the many safety-critical and non-safety-critical applications, adequate access control systems are required. We use the notion of contexts to dynamically determine, which application is allowed to access which display area. A context can be derived from vehicle sensors e.g., the current speed, or be an application-specific state e.g., which menu item is selected. We propose an access control model that is inherently aware of the context of the car and the applications. It provides delegation of access rights to display areas by applications. We implemented a proof-of-concept implementation that demonstrates the feasibility of our concept and evaluated the latency introduced by access control. Our results show that the delay reacting on dynamic context changes is small enough for automotive scenarios.