Public Relations

Karamba Security, a Connected Car Security Partner, Enters Collaborative Partnership with Alpine and Others

January 16, 2018
Asgent, Inc.
（JASDAQ: 4288）

Asgent, Inc. (JASDAQ: 4288, President & CEO: Takahiro Sugimoto, located in Chuo-ku, Tokyo), a pioneer in network security and operations management solutions, announces that Karamba Security (CEO & Co-founder: Ami Dotan, located in Israel), the developer of "Carwall", a security product that Asgent sells to Japanese corporations such as car makers (OEM) and peripheral suppliers (Tier 1, 2), will cooperate with three global automotive industry partners including Alpine Electronics, Inc. to protect connected cars and autonomous vehicles from hackers.

The partners that Karamba will be working with are Alpine Electronics, Inc. (Japan), IAV GmBH (Germany) and Honeywell International Inc. (USA). In order to handle attack methods and vectors that constantly evolve, each company will provide their unique expertise and technology and cooperate to develop a multi-layer solution to protect connected cars and autonomous vehicles.

Alpine manufactures and provides car navigation and audio systems for automobiles around the world. By integrating Karamba´s autonomous security product Carwall, it can provide robust security against attackers who try to hack the infotainment system. At CES (https://www.ces.tech) in Las Vegas on January 9th, a demonstration was performed to show how a robust infotainment system capable of withstanding ransomware attacks can be provided. The companies purposes integrated a vulnerability into the infotainment system and compared the vulnerable system with one protected by Carwall. The vulnerable system was locked up by the ransomware attack, but the same attack failed in the protected system. Also, a detailed incident report on the attack was sent to Karamba´s incident management server.
IAV integrates with Karamba to develop an Automotive Security Defense Center to provide methods to prevent attacks.
Honeywell, in conjunction with Karamba, identifies and verifies software commands and data in runtime that are generated from over 100 million lines of code that manage operations of the vehicle. Honeywell´s IDS monitors the vehicle network communications and Karamba´s ECU prevents attacks on the automobile.

Through this collaborative effort, Karamba is aiming to both ensure consumer safety and implement stronger and more layered preventative measures by overcoming industry barriers to enable auto manufacturers and Tier 1 providers to maintain legal compliance.

The automotive industry is facing many security issues, and the most important among them is authentication systems for automotive networks. In order to protect systems from hacking and prevent OTA updates from being misused to implant malware on the ECU (Electronic Control Unit), car area network (CAN) authentication systems are vital. To protect automobiles from physical hacking or unauthorized ECUs, auto makers are demanding that suppliers provide authentication on the car area network. Karamba’s second security product following "Carwall", "SafeCAN" answers those needs without any overhead.

Karamba´s autonomous security products "Carwall" and "IoTwall" provides industry-leading cybersecurity solutions for connected cars and IoT devices. Security configurations are set on the ECU itself during the manufacturing process. Therefore, it is possible to prevent attacks without the need for anti-malware signature updates. Also, factory default settings are automatically learnt and a security policy to detect and prevent any behavior that does not follow those settings is automatically generated. This enables real-time protection from zero-day attacks over the lifecycle of the protected product. In addition, this security functionality is not limited to the automotive industry and can be applied to architecture that controlled by controllers in IoT, medical devices and drones etc. The product concept has been recognized in 2017 with the North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Automotive New Product Innovation, as well as being selected as a 2016 Forbes Israel Top 10 Security Venture, and the technology and forward thinking of the company is gaining a great deal of attention.

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