Karamba wants to protect connected cars from hackers
The "find and destroy" techniques used to protect servers and enterprise networks are unsuitable for safeguarding connected vehicles, which need to have threats stopped before they enter the system, according to Israeli cyber security start-up Karamba Security. While a high-end vehicle may have more than 100 tiny computers, known as electronic control units, only a few, such as the infotainment system and the remote keyless entry, are connected wirelessly to the outside world, and it is those vulnerabilities that are the focus of Karamba security solution.

Cars represent a fundamentally different sort of security challenge from laptops, servers, or mobile phones, in which corruption or theft of data is the hacker’s objective. A cyber-attack on a moving vehicle may create a deadly safety hazard, and conventional antihacking software could be too slow or ineffective to avert an incident.

“Dealing with consumer safety, and not just with data security, requires different security methods to protect our cars, in contrast to technologies that protect servers and enterprise networks,” says David Barzilai, executive chairman and cofounder of Karamba Security, a two-year-old startup based in Hod HaSharon, Israel, with an office in metropolitan Detroit.

“Using machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify malware after hackers infiltrate the car is too late,” he says. “The approach must be to prevent an attack when hackers attempt to hack.”

The field of automotive cybersecurity is small but expanding rapidly as new threats are discovered to emerging technologies such as vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication. Harman International, maker of the Uconnect system in the hacked Jeep, acquired TowerSec, an Israeli cybersecurity firm, in early 2016. Argus Cyber Security, another Israeli competitor, recently discovered and demonstrated a way to penetrate a car’s electronics with a “dongle,” an innocent-looking piece of hardware resembling a flash drive that operates software via a car’s USB or other port. Tesla and Fiat Chrysler both offer monetary “bug bounty” rewards for hobbyists and amateur hackers who find and report software vulnerabilities.

Given the skill, motivation, and creativity of hackers, it is unclear that any one approach can comprehensively block their entry to a vehicle’s electronic architecture. “Vulnerabilities will be inadvertently designed into systems,” says Sam Abuelsamid, a senior analyst for Navigant, a marketing research firm based in Boulder, Colorado.

A premium car may come equipped with a hundred or more electronic control units, or ECUs (in actuality, small computers), connected to one another as part of the vehicle’s electronic architecture. Only a handful, such as the infotainment system and the remote keyless entry, are connected wirelessly to the outside world, offering openings for attackers. Karamba focuses on blocking intrusion at these points, as one critical layer of a larger security design.

Karamba’s antihacking software is embedded in an ECU when it is manufactured, so it is incorporated into the device’s factory settings and not subject to change. Its role is to block spurious code at the point of intrusion, sealing the ECU and denying entry to any code that does not comply explicitly with the factory settings.

Using software monitoring programs to find and destroy malware, Barzilai maintains, is too slow and requires constant updates by developers; that can promote an arms race with hackers, who try to outwit security programs as they grow more sophisticated. Such programs can also generate false positives, he says, which are dangerous in cars because they may impede safe operation.