The MIPI Alliance is an international organization that develops interface specifications for mobile and mobile-influenced industries. It has announced the release of the MIPI Camera Security Framework – a flexible approach to add end-to-end security to automotive applications that leverage the MIPI Camera Serial Interface 2 (CSI-2).
Because of the safety-critical role of image sensors in ADAS and autonomous driving systems, protecting image sensor data against cybersecurity risks is important. Advanced image sensor-enabled systems must be secured from risks such as the installation of illegitimate image sensor components, malicious manipulation of sensor data and privacy violations from unauthorized access.
The new MIPI Camera Security Framework enables authentication of system components, data integrity protection and data encryption. It provides implementers with a choice of security protocols, cipher suites, data integrity tag modes and security controls.
While other interface security methods protect only the link layer, the MIPI Camera Security Framework delivers application-level protection from “silicon to silicon” with the MIPI Camera Serial Interface 2 (CSI-2). The security transcends all link-layer components to provide end-to-end CSI-2 protection from the source of sensor data in sensor silicon to the ultimate sink of that data in system-on-chip silicon.
In this way, comprehensive CSI-2 protection is guaranteed, irrespective of the underlying communication network topology, offering developers the flexibility to leverage any combination of bridges, aggregators, forwarding elements and other underlying network components to achieve the most efficient solution for their specific application.
The MIPI Camera Security Framework also allows highly detailed security control over the different segments of the CSI-2 image frame to enable a “sliding scale” of security levels.
The new security framework is a key component of MIPI Automotive SerDes Solutions (MASS) connectivity solutions, and the new security services within the framework are fully complementary to the functional safety services that have already been introduced.