Analysis of cyber incidents and/or attacks on road vehicles

Description company:

RDW is the Netherlands Vehicle Authority in the mobility chain. RDW has developed extensive expertise through its years of experience in executing its statutory and assigned tasks. Tasks in the area of the licensing of vehicles and vehicle parts, supervision and enforcement, registration, information provision and issuing documents. Tasks that RDW carries out in close cooperation with various partners in the mobility chain. This provides RDW with a clear position in this chain, with its mission being: RDW stands for safety, sustainability and legal certainty in mobility.

Description department:

You work for the Vehicle Regulation & Licensing (VRT) division. You are part of the Applied Innovation team that focuses on knowledge and product development for the development of new legislation, new licensing frameworks and working methods for vehicle innovation. We take a learning-by-doing approach, developing new products and knowledge and then validating them by also applying them, including by conducting practical trials on public roads.

What are you going to do:

he automotive industry has started using software extensively with the increase of automation levels. This has given rise to usage of electrical and electronic components, specially ECUs, in a vehicle. The ensemble of different electronic components with software introduces a new set of cybersecurity challenges. One such challenge is to successfully type approve a vehicle for cybersecurity.

To ensure cybersecurity, vehicle manufacturers need to execute a risk-based approach to develop, produce and monitor E/E architectures of the vehicles. However, the threat landscape is constantly evolving and new vulnerabilities leading to cyber-attacks or incidents are frequent nowadays. This puts forward a unique challenge of monitoring the cybersecurity of vehicles which have been already type approved. This is in fact more challenging and unique to type approval authorities like RDW among others. Automotive cybersecurity monitoring is a new field in itself for regulatory and surveillance agencies. Moreover, the global regulation for cybersecurity in vehicles R155[1] needs constant upgrade for the developing maturity of the automotive cybersecurity and to handle changing threat landscape.

Objective

The objective of this project is to collect information regarding recent vulnerabilities leading to cyber-incidents/cyber-attacks in the automotive industry published by global security researchers and others. These vulnerabilities or incidents/cyber-attacks shall be prioritized and analyzed. Based on the analysis result, following shall be proposed to RDW:

Response strategy/handling for such incidents/cyber-attacks including communication, mitigation and recall aspects

Checkpoints for cybersecurity testing for type approval

Improvement in the current type approval for cybersecurity

Update/create regulatory requirements and test methods

Lessons learned and continuous improvement

This will help RDW better handle the changing threat landscape as and when the vehicles are approved for cybersecurity.

What do you bring:
You are a 3rd year student (HBO/WO) in the field of automotive engineering or mechatronics with a healthy dose of energy, perseverance and a solution-oriented mind. Are you a student in a different field, but still interested in this internship? Please contact us to inquire about the possibilities.

You are looking for an internship for 5-6 months starting in February, for at least 32 hours per week.

You are always willing to learn, improve and think outside of the box!

What do we offer:

> An interesting and challenging internship starting February 2023.

> An allowance of €586,80 per month (based on a 36-hour work week).

> The possibility to (partly) work from home.

> The supervisor will assure their full availability as well as a friendly environment.

Contactinformatie / Contactinformation:

You can apply via the button below.

As an intern you will bw working at our office in Zoetermeer and/or from home. Our office can be easily reached by public transport.

Do you want to know more about this assignment? Please contact Sanjeet Pattnaik, Skumarpattnaik@rdw.nl or 0646001678.

The internship will start February 2023 voor a period of 5-6 months.