A car with 100M lines of code and OTA updates is a computer on wheels — and an attractive target. One compromised fleet could be catastrophic.
Attack Vectors
- OTA spoofing: Fake updates pushing malicious firmwares
- Sensor spoofing: Fake LiDAR points creating ghost obstacles
- V2X jamming: Blocking intersection messages
Defense Stack 2026
UNECE R155 + ISO/SAE 21434 mandate: hardware root of trust, signed OTA, IDS on CAN-Ethernet gateway, and 24/7 SOC monitoring. Tesla and Rivian push delta OTA in 30 sec with rollback if hash fails.
Best practice: zero-trust — every ECU authenticates every message, and the AV can run safely even isolated from cloud.