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.

Ensuring vehicle security in the modern era

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:

• Satisfy the need for “esteem” — meaning it must securely and reliably store user profile data, such as account credentials, biometric data, payment details, and more.
• Satisfy the user’s cognitive needs — meaning it must provide secure internet connectivity, transmit vehicle telemetry, and send reminders for scheduled or emergency maintenance.

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.

Why Kaspersky Automotive Secure Gateway?

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.

Automotive IDS

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:

• Alignment of CAN message parameters (CAN ID, DLC) with their descriptions in the DBC specification.
• Frequency and periodicity of CAN messages.
• Allowable ranges for CAN signals.

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.

Connecting a vehicle to an SIEM

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:

• Collect security events from multiple vehicles.
• Correlate events over time and across contexts.
• Detect advanced and distributed attacks.
• Provide incident auditing and investigation.
• Respond to individual incidents and manage cyber-risks fleet-wide.

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.

It’s best to think of the modern car as a computer on wheels — one that constantly offloads diagnostic data to the manufacturer or dealer’s servers. On board, you’ll find dozens of sensors: everything from GPS, speedometers, and hands-free microphones, to external cameras and the less obvious (but highly active) sensors for pedal pressure, tire pressure, engine temperature, and more. Even if this data isn’t beamed to the manufacturer in real-time, it’s logged in the car’s internal memory, and can reveal a wealth of information about a driver’s trips, habits, and surroundings. We’ve already taken a deep dive into how automakers collect data for commercial use, and who they sell it to (spoiler alert: insurance companies are the biggest buyers of telemetry), but today we’re looking at how law enforcement and intelligence agencies tap into this goldmine.

Digital evidence

Police departments across the globe have recognized the immense value of data stored within vehicles. If a car or its owner is potentially linked to a crime, investigators do more than just check for prints or DNA. Car Intelligence (CARINT) technology allows them to essentially scour all onboard computers, extracting data such as:

• GPS-based trip history
• Call logs, media player activity, and voice commands
• Lists of paired devices and synced contact lists
• Driving statistics: mileage, engine performance modes, and other technical parameters

There are numerous precedents where this data has served as evidence and dismantled alibis. In one U.S. criminal case, a recorded voice command became a smoking gun, proving the suspect was behind the wheel of a stolen vehicle.

With the rise of connected cars equipped with their own SIM cards and direct links to the manufacturer, law enforcement no longer needs physical access to the vehicle. Key data, such as GPS location history, can be pulled directly from the manufacturer’s servers. Furthermore, a U.S. Senate investigation revealed that nine out of 14 surveyed automakers were providing this data without a warrant.

Major suppliers of car intelligence software, such as Ateros, Berla, TA9/Rayzone, and Toka, sell their solutions exclusively to government and law enforcement agencies, which is why they’ve remained largely out of the public eye.

Comprehensive surveillance

To track persons of interest, data pulled from the vehicle itself is cross-referenced with information from other sources. According to media leaks, flagship products in this category aggregate data from the car’s SIM card, Bluetooth communication trails, street-level CCTV footage, and commercially available information from data brokers. This hybrid dataset simplifies the comprehensive mapping of a target’s movements and contacts. Journalists have discovered that some companies even market the ability to activate a vehicle’s microphones and cameras remotely and covertly, enabling real-time eavesdropping on conversations. However, experts note that due to the diversity of technical implementations across different systems, hacking the car itself remains a difficult task with no sure way of succeeding. Often, it’s simpler to correlate other, more accessible datasets to achieve the same result.

Factory-installed spy tools

Features like covert activation of cameras, microphones, and other sensors may theoretically be part of a vehicle’s stock functionality rather than the result of a hack. While we haven’t found any public evidence of such cases, it’s well known that Chinese-made vehicles are coming under increased scrutiny in several countries. For instance, they’ve been banned from Israeli military sites — with the exception of a single Chery model, provided its multimedia system is removed. Similar bans exist in the UK and Poland; furthermore, UK Ministry of Defense employees are instructed not to connect their work phones to Chinese-made cars. In Germany, security analyses of Chinese vehicles were conducted by the specialized agencies BfV and ZITiS, but the findings remain classified.

Low-cost surveillance

Tracking a vehicle — or even thousands of them — doesn’t necessarily require hacking onboard systems or tapping into vast networks of license plate readers. A recent scientific study demonstrated that innocent tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS) provide enough data for effective tracking. Data from these sensors is transmitted via radio without any encryption and includes a unique ID that makes identifying a specific car easy. This allows for more than just confirming the vehicle’s movement; it can even be used to estimate the driver’s weight or determine if they are traveling alone. While this might not sound as impressive as remotely accessing a car’s cameras, it requires very little financial investment and works even on relatively old vehicles without an internet connection.

What you can do about vehicle tracking

While tracking a person through their car is undoubtedly a privacy risk, striking a balance in mitigating this threat is difficult: many measures are complex, largely ineffective, and simultaneously reduce the utility, safety, and convenience of a modern vehicle. Consequently, any steps taken should be weighed against your personal risk profile.

To reduce the risk of data leaks, check the privacy settings in the manufacturer’s app, the car’s infotainment system, and your connected smartphone. A connected car can transmit data about its operation to the cloud: information about trips, location, driving style, vehicle condition, and the operation of its components. Some of this data is necessary for navigation, diagnostics, and service, but not all permissions are required — check your settings and disable the transmission of data not related to the functions you need.

Be careful with permissions for access to the microphone, camera, contacts, messages, and geolocation. Only connect your own devices to the car and don’t save other people’s phones or unfamiliar Bluetooth devices in the system. When syncing your smartphone, select only the features you need — such as calls, music, and navigation — rather than granting full access to all your phone’s data.

Do not use the services of technicians who offer to “unlock” your car, reflash electronic control units, or install unofficial software to expand features, increase power, or otherwise interfere with the car’s operation. Such software has not been tested by the manufacturer: it may behave unpredictably, collect and transmit your data to malicious actors, disable security features, or affect critical vehicle systems — including steering, braking, or engine operation.

And when choosing a new car, ask the dealer not only about the number of stars in NCAP safety tests, engine power, or fuel economy, but also about the cybersecurity technologies used in the vehicle. Solutions such as the Kaspersky Automotive Secure Gateway, based on KasperskyOS, will provide the necessary protection for new cars against cyberthreats.

What other threats do connected cars hide? Read more in our posts:

• Highway to… hacked: cyberthreats to connected cars
• Car hacking via Bluetooth
• Botnets on wheels: the mass hacking of dashcams
• How millions of Kia cars could be tracked
• I know how you drove last summer
• Spies on wheels: how carmakers collect and then resell information

Multiple news outlets are reporting on Israel’s hacking of Iranian traffic cameras and how they assisted with the killing of that country’s leadership.

The New York Times has an on the intelligence operation more generally.

Interesting research: “CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI.”

Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training distributions and adapt to novel real-world situations. These capabilities, however, also create new security risks. In this paper, we introduce CHAI (Command Hijacking against embodied AI), a new class of prompt-based attacks that exploit the multimodal language interpretation abilities of Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs). CHAI embeds deceptive natural language instructions, such as misleading signs, in visual input, systematically searches the token space, builds a dictionary of prompts, and guides an attacker model to generate Visual Attack Prompts. We evaluate CHAI on four LVLM agents; drone emergency landing, autonomous driving, and aerial object tracking, and on a real robotic vehicle. Our experiments show that CHAI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art attacks. By exploiting the semantic and multimodal reasoning strengths of next-generation embodied AI systems, CHAI underscores the urgent need for defenses that extend beyond traditional adversarial robustness.

News article.

British defence firms have reportedly warned staff not to connect their phones to Chinese-made EVs

Mobile phones and desktop computers are longstanding targets for cyber spies – but how vulnerable are electric cars?

On Monday the i newspaper claimed that British defence firms working for the UK government have warned staff against connecting or pairing their phones with Chinese-made electric cars, due to fears that Beijing could extract sensitive data from the devices.