CESAR

Connected vehicles allow to update the software (SW) running on their integrated electronic control units (ECUs) over-the-air. Such updates are complex procedures that involve several steps, such as the authentication with a remote device, the secure and reliable wireless transfer of the new binary, as well as its installation and verification on the target ECU. Each of these aspects affects the efficiency of the entire SW update process, and it is important to evaluate the impact of different solutions on the functionality of a vehicle and to compare their performance on real hardware. In this paper we present CESAR, a configurable testbed infrastructure that allows to evaluate the efficiency of an automotive SW update system in a highly automated way. CESAR allows to specify different update mechanisms, security configurations, wireless protocols used for the data transfer, and to carefully define the scenario of interest (i.e., pin down the number of wireless vehicle interfaces, the network topology, and the target ECU). Furthermore, CESAR can be used to measure the efficiency of a SW update on real hardware, and to derive insights about the weaknesses of a system under test or about the interaction of a specific SW with a given ECU.