Access mechanisms to system data and/or control is a primary use case of the hardware protected security environment (hardware protected security environment) during different uses and stages of the system. The hardware protected security environment acts as a gatekeeper for these use cases and not necessarily as the executor of the function. This section is a generalization of such use cases in an attempt to extract common requirements for the hardware protected security environment that enable it to be a gatekeeper.

Examples are:

Creating a new key fob

Re-flashing ECU firmware

Reading/exporting PII out of the ECU

Using a subscription-based feature

Performing some service on an ECU

Transferring ownership of the vehicle

Some of these examples are discussed later in this section and some have detailed sections of their own. This list is by no means comprehensive. Other use cases that require hardware protected security environment-based access control may be used by each manufacturer/service provider based on vehicle capabilities, architecture, and business model.

This section describes how the hardware protected security environment provides a platform to implement access control by enabling secure authentication, authorization and access enforcement. It does not define any specific access control system (DAC/MAC/capability-based/role-based/etc.), models, or polices.

A general access control system is based on the following stages:

1

Identifying and authenticating the user.

2

Authorizing access to the resource.

a

Comparing authenticated user to policies (database/certificates/other).

b

Comparing other conditions (temporal/spatial/other) to policies database.

c

Unlocking access to the resource.

3

Using the resource.

4

(Optional) Removing access to the resource based on temporal or other conditions.

a

Locking access to the resource.

The hardware protected security environment can be involved to different extents in each of the stages listed above. The main two types of hardware protected security environment involvements are full control and partial control. In partial control, the hardware protected security environment is responsible to authenticate and authorize the access, while the normal environment is responsible to lock/unlock the resource. In full control, the hardware protected security environment is responsible for both.