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The infrastructure in modern cars is a heterogeneous and historically grown network of different field buses coupling different electronic control units (ECUs) from different sources. In the past years, the amount of ECUs in the network has rapidly grown due to the mushrooming of new functions which historically were mostly implemented on a one-ECU-per-function basis resulting in up to a hundred ECUs in fully equipped luxury cars. Additionally, new functions like parking assist systems or advanced chassis control functions are getting increasingly complex and require more computing power. These two facts add up to a complex challenge in development. The current trend to host several functions in single ECUs as integration platforms is one attempt to address this challenge. This trend is supported by the increased computing power of current and upcoming multi-core microcontrollers.

The current automotive electronic and electrical (EE) architecture has reached a scalability limit and in order to adapt to the new and upcoming requirements, novel automotive EE architectures are currently being investigated to support: a) an Ethernet backbone, b) consolidation of hardware capabilities leading to a centralized architecture from an existing distributed architecture, c) optimization of wiring to reduce cost, and d) adaptation of service-oriented software architectures. These requirements lead to the development of Zonal EE architectures as a possible solution that require appropriate adaptation of used security mechanisms and the corresponding utilized hardware trust anchors. 1 The current architecture approaches (ECU internal and in-vehicle networking) are being pushed to their limits, simultaneously, the current embedded security solutions also seem to reveal their limitations due to an increase in connectivity.