Vehicle Cyber Engineering (VCE) Testbed with CLaaS (Cyber-Security Labs as a Service)

The University of Detroit Mercy Vehicle Cyber Engineering (VCE) Laboratory together with The University of Arizona is supporting Secure Vehicle Embedded Systems research work and course projects.The University of Detroit Mercy VCE Laboratory has established several testbeds to cover experimental techniques to ensure the security of an embedded design that includes: data isolation, memory protection, virtual memory, secure scheduling, access control and capabilities, hypervisors and system virtualization, input/output virtualization, embedded cryptography implementation, authentication and access control, hacking techniques, malware, trusted computing, intrusion detection systems, cryptography, programming security and secure software/firmware updates.The VCE Laboratory testbeds are connected with an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-based Cyber-security Labs as a Service (CLaaS) system, which allows students and researchers to access the testbeds from any place that has a secure internet connection. VCE students are assigned predefined virtual machines to perform designated cyber-security experiments. The CLaaS system has low administrative overhead associated with experiment setup and management.One of the testbeds in the VCE Lab is the TestCube vehicle simulator device. The TestCube is a programmable OBD-II vehicle gateway that can operate as an entire vehicle that is running on-board diagnostics communications sequences. VCE Laboratory CLaaS experiments have been developed for demonstrating man-in-the-middle cyber-security attacks from actual compromised hardware or software connected with the TestCube.This paper will describe the CLaaS system and experiments utilizing the TestCube testbed. In addition, we will show that the data transfer latency between experiments running on the VCE Laboratory testbed and the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a sustainable communication rate for operating the testbed.It is also worth noting that the CLaaS vehicle diagnostics security system testbed could be extended for use in applications to support a vehicle digital twin platform.