An Amanat-Based Multi-party Certification Protocol for Outsourced Software in Automotive Systems

As autonomous features advance, it is believed that most behaviors, including safety-critical functions, of future automotive systems will be defined by software. Due to the safety-critical nature, correctness and quality of automotive software draw more and more concerns, and software certification should integrate verification, simulation, and testing results in systematic and rigorous ways to prove the fulfillment of governments' regulations, reduce system designers' liability, and enhance customers' confidence. Expecting that software certification will become a necessary step in future automotive design, we resolve a conflict between certification issuers and software suppliers and developers in this paper. Based on the Amanat protocol [6], we address its challenges in the automotive domain and propose a protocol which guarantees authenticity to certification issuers and confidentiality to software suppliers and developers. Authenticity means that only authenticated results from compilers and analysis tools (verification, simulation, and/or testing) are considered by the certification issuers in the certification process, and confidentiality means that sensitive source codes of the software suppliers and developers are not released to certification issuers. The proposed protocol is an important step towards the realization of practical automotive software certification.