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This paper conducts an architectural analysis of Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) in automotive electronic control units (ECUs), highlighting their critical role in ensuring software integrity and authenticity amid various security threats. By surveying integration models and examining the implications of design choices on secure boot chains, storage, execution, and software signing, the authors identify key trade-offs between isolation, performance, and security. The findings underscore the necessity for scalable and resilient HSM architectures to address emerging challenges like cryptographic agility and post-quantum readiness in the automotive sector.
HSM design choices can significantly impact the security and performance of automotive systems, revealing critical trade-offs that could reshape industry standards.
Automotive electronic control units (ECUs) increasingly depend on hardware-rooted security to protect software integrity, authenticity, and lifecycle management in the presence of remote and physical threats. Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) have become a key building block in automotive system-on-chips (SoCs), providing isolated cryptographic services, secure key storage, and controlled execution under stringent real-time and cost constraints. This paper presents an architectural analysis of automotive HSMs and examines their role in establishing secure boot and hardware roots of trust. We first survey common HSM integration models used in production ECUs and discuss their flexibility and current automotive use cases. We then introduce realistic threat models to motivate hardware-backed security controls and analyze how HSM design choices influence secure boot chains of trust, secure storage, secure execution, and software signing mechanisms. Key tradeoffs between isolation, performance, updateability, and attack surface are discussed, with optional consideration of side-channel implications. The paper concludes by highlighting open challenges and future directions for scalable and resilient automotive hardware security. Finally, we discuss emerging challenges such as cryptographic agility and post-quantum readiness that are likely to shape the next generation of automotive HSM architectures.
