Empirical Study for Open Source Libraries in Automotive Software Systems

Abstract

Open-source software has revolutionized the field of software development, providing a collaborative and transparent approach that encourages knowledge sharing and innovation. However, the adoption of open-source software in automotive systems introduces security concerns that require careful scrutiny and management. While previous studies have investigated the general open-source software ecosystem, this paper focuses specifically on the unique characteristics and challenges of open-source software in automotive vehicles. To achieve these goals, we examine real-world examples and case studies to analyze the impact of open-source software on automotive systems. We extracted and collected 4092 open source components from real-world automotive firmware and compared the differences and similarities to 20010 commonly used components in operating systems such as Linux. The results show that the automotive firmware contains 79.8 open source components on average, which account for 15.84% of all binary files in the firmware. Moreover, 61.15% detected libraries are automotive-specific and are different from the commonly used components. By gaining insights this research provides valuable recommendations to improve automotive security by building the database of automotive-specific open source libraries.

Keywords

• Automotive software
• open source security
• software component analysis