ISO21434 CAL4 Compliant Wireless Battery Management System

2023-03-28

Wireless battery management for electric vehicles (EV) is now a reality, finally reaping the long-promised advantages of wiring harness elimination and pack simplification. These in turn reduce the vehicle weight that help extend driving range and enable automation in manufacturing that increase mechanical reliability of the pack.

Going wireless is not without challenges. Technological innovations are needed to achieve wireless robustness to interference and to ensure safety. Yet the system would not be complete if system security was not considered from the beginning. After all, the threat of the wireless interface being exploited by a remote malicious attacker to gain control of a mission critical application within a vehicle is a scary proposition.

Proper consideration needs to be given for cybersecurity risk management across the lifecycle of a wireless battery management system (wBMS), which starts with a threat assessment if there is none publicly available. ISO 21434 outlines a process for developing a secure product for use in automotive from concept to development to deployment and end of life. System security needs to account for all the stages in a product’s lifecycle, so that none of the lifecycle stages expose the weakest link due to unexpected behavior or vulnerabilities.

Cybersecurity is a critical and urgent need that starts from holistic system design, even in systems, which end up being subsystems of bigger systems. Compliance to ISO 21434 on a process level is not enough; the product itself needs to undergo levels of validation testing and vulnerability scanning to gain the proper assurance. For a mission critical application, the highest cybersecurity assurance level (CAL 4) is necessary.

This talk discusses wBMS security goals, how they are derived and developed on an ISO 21434 compliant process, and what sets a secure wBMS solution apart from others.

ISO21434 CAL4 Compliant Wireless Battery Management System

2023-03-28

Wireless battery management for electric vehicles (EV) is now a reality, finally reaping the long-promised advantages of wiring harness elimination and pack simplification. These in turn reduce the vehicle weight that help extend driving range and enable automation in manufacturing that increase mechanical reliability of the pack.

Going wireless is not without challenges. Technological innovations are needed to achieve wireless robustness to interference and to ensure safety. Yet the system would not be complete if system security was not considered from the beginning. After all, the threat of the wireless interface being exploited by a remote malicious attacker to gain control of a mission critical application within a vehicle is a scary proposition.

Proper consideration needs to be given for cybersecurity risk management across the lifecycle of a wireless battery management system (wBMS), which starts with a threat assessment if there is none publicly available. ISO 21434 outlines a process for developing a secure product for use in automotive from concept to development to deployment and end of life. System security needs to account for all the stages in a product’s lifecycle, so that none of the lifecycle stages expose the weakest link due to unexpected behavior or vulnerabilities.

Cybersecurity is a critical and urgent need that starts from holistic system design, even in systems, which end up being subsystems of bigger systems. Compliance to ISO 21434 on a process level is not enough; the product itself needs to undergo levels of validation testing and vulnerability scanning to gain the proper assurance. For a mission critical application, the highest cybersecurity assurance level (CAL 4) is necessary.

This talk discusses wBMS security goals, how they are derived and developed on an ISO 21434 compliant process, and what sets a secure wBMS solution apart from others.