AWS Connected Vehicle Reference Architecture

Publication date: January 17, 2024 (Diagram history)

This architecture enables you to use AWS IoT Core to modernize workloads, process vehicle data, and secure your connected vehicles.

AWS Connected Vehicle - Modernization Diagram

Use AWS IoT Core and MQTT5 to modernize your broker to gather, collect, and distribute data with your connected vehicle workloads.

1. Embedded in-vehicle devices with a unique identity principal (X.509 certificate) publish telemetry data to AWS IoT Core by using MQTT. To minimize in-vehicle software, only libraries necessary to connect to AWS IoT Core are implemented. All traffic is sent over MQTT protocol secured using mTLS.

2. Use AWS PrivateLink and a private cellular network to connect your own AWS IoT Core endpoint to AWS IoT Core.

3. Shared subscriptions on AWS IoT Core help client workers process data payloads coming in from millions of vehicles by load balancing across topics. By implementing the topic alias feature, you can reduce payload size over the cellular connection, saving power consumption and cost.

4. Use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to decode, process, and persist the telemetry data. Amazon ECS supports the scalability necessary to handle the messages at peak demand and not run into concurrency bottlenecks.

5. Using a specialized message header, AWS IoT Core routes encoded messages to their destination. For compressed payloads, the routing mechanism is placed in the payload header, routing without human readable format to send messages downstream. The descriptor file is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to inform the rule how to decode the payload.

6. The request/response messaging pattern in AWS IoT Core tracks responses to client requests in an asynchronous way. The customer submits a remote command to their vehicle using an interface built by AWS Amplify through Amazon API Gateway. The command is persisted to Amazon DynamoDB and delivered as a request to the device by using a request IoT topic. After implementation, the vehicle responds on the response IoT Topic to report success or failure. This same pattern can be used for vehicle-to-cloud to report state.

7. For the same remote command, using the Message Expiry feature of AWS IoT Core, you can specify how long to attempt to unlock a vehicle door, before expiring the message. This allows for much more flexible control of devices.

8. Critical system messages sent from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to the vehicle can use the AWS IoT Core Retained Messages function. The OEM can set a retained message flag on the payload to ensure the command is in the topic when the vehicle comes back online.

AWS Connected Vehicle - Gather, Process, Analyze Diagram

Gather, process, analyze, and act on connected vehicle data using AWS IoT Core.

1. The connected vehicle, acting as an IoT device, with a unique identity principal (X.509 certificate), uses sensors to collect, analyze and act upon data using AWS IoT Core as an edge-to-cloud communication mechanism.

2. The AWS IoT FleetWise Edge Agent communicates with the vehicle’s network, decoding signals and sending data payloads through AWS IoT Core as defined by data campaigns. With AWS IoT FleetWise, you control every step of the process and maintain full data ownership and control of proprietary information.

3. Use AWS IoT Core together with Amazon Route 53 to choose an AWS Region based on geo location or latency. Register your devices automatically when they connect for the first time to AWS IoT Core. The DNS lookup returns an IoT endpoint from one of many Regions depending on device location.

4. AWS IoT supports client certificates signed by any root or intermediate certificate authorities (CA) that are registered with AWS IoT Core. Upon connecting with the private certificate, the AWS Lambda function validates the Gateway and creates the IoT thing, policy, and certificate. The vehicle is registered.

5. AWS IoT FleetWise helps you more intelligently collect vehicle data. You can improve data relevance by creating time and event-based data collection campaigns that send the exact data you need to the cloud to Amazon Timestream or Amazon S3.

6. Use Amazon SageMaker to improve ADAS/AV models and optimize vehicle design for performance and efficiency. Use Amazon QuickSight to continually improve vehicle quality, safety, and autonomy using near real-time data from AWS IoT FleetWise.

7. Using AWS IoT Core Device Shadow can make a vehicle’s state available to apps and other downstream services whether the device is connected to AWS IoT Core or not, providing a built-in mechanism to update the vehicle's state from the cloud.

8. Use AWS IoT Device Management to implement over-the-air (OTA) management through IoT jobs and use AWS IoT fleet indexing to manage state, connectivity, and device violations and to organize, investigate, and troubleshoot your fleet of devices.

9. Use the power of AWS IoT Core integrations with downstream services to enable use cases to empower your different user personas from fleet aggregators to data scientists and vehicle owners.

AWS Connected Vehicle - Operational Certificate Lifecycle Diagram

Secure your connected vehicles with provisioning, OCSP, and certificate rotation.

1. A subordinate CA is created in AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA) with a CA certificate signed by the offline root CA. The subordinate CA certificate is registered with AWS IoT Core.

2. The electronic control unit (ECU) generates a private key and certificate signing request (CSR) and uses its existing attestation certificate to authenticate to the certificate broker. The certificate broker issues the operational certificate by calling AWS Private CA. The broker sends the signed operational certificate to the ECU.

3. The ECU uses TLS with the operational certificate to connect to AWS IoT Core, which validates the client certificate was signed by the registered CA certificate and that the certificate is not expired. Because this is the first use of the certification, it is not registered with AWS IoT Core; AWS IoT Core creates a pending activation certificate and the ECU is disconnected. AWS IoT Core publishes a message to a reserved MQTT topic.

4. An IoT rule on the reserved MQTT topic invokes the Lambda registration function. The function implements custom logic like generating an AWS IoT Core policy specific to the ECU using information from a DynamoDB table, and custom authentication such as checking the certificate against the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) responder provided by AWS Private CA.

5. The function then creates an IoT thing and policy, and changes the certificate status to active. The ECU can retry the connection and communicate to topics in AWS IoT Core.

6. AWS IoT Device Defender publishes audit findings such as certificate expiring and certificate revoked to AWS Security Hub. Security Hub sends events to Amazon EventBridge, which initiates targets such as an AWS Step Functions workflow to rotate the certificate. EventBridge can also send audit findings to your vehicle security operations center.

7. The workflow orchestrates Lambda functions that use IoT jobs to push the ECU to generate a new CSR and send it to a topic. Upon receiving the CSR, it issues a new operational certificate by calling AWS Private CA to sign the certificate, registers the certificate in AWS IoT Core with a policy, and sends the certificate to the ECU. Once the ECU has successfully installed and tested the new operational certificate, the workflow revokes the old certificate.

8. You can invoke the AWS Private CA APIs to revoke a certificate and update the certificate status in AWS IoT Core.

AWS Connected Vehicle - Encryption and Monitoring Security Diagram

Secure your connected vehicles with AWS encryption and monitoring services.

1. An ECU with a unique identity principal (X.509 operational certificate) publishes telemetry by using MQTT to AWS IoT Core. The ECU can either run a generic HTTP or MQTT stack or accelerate development using the AWS IoT Device SDK.

2. During the TLS handshake, AWS IoT Core validates the client certificate expiry, and checks that the certificate is registered and active. AWS IoT Core retrieves policies attached to both the certificate and thing groups for the thing attached to the certificate in order to authorize operations performed by the ECU.

3. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) lets you create, manage, and control cryptographic keys across your applications and AWS services. Encryption at rest on the server side is available for all the services in the diagram.

4. You can choose to encrypt highly sensitive payload data on the client side before sending it to AWS IoT Core in addition to encryption-in-transit using mTLS. The vehicle can use the AWS encryption SDK using keys in AWS KMS for client-side encryption. The ECU can get temporary API credentials from the IoT credential provider to call AWS KMS APIs. You can also implement your own key management system for encryption keys.

5. Sensitive payload data flows through intermediate systems as opaque ciphertext until it arrives at a Lambda function that has an execution role with permissions to invoke AWS KMS. The Lambda function code uses the AWS encryption SDK to decrypt the data key and decrypt the sensitive data.

6. Authenticated users can send authenticated and authorized remote commands to applications by using Amazon API Gateway. The request Lambda function with execution role permissions can use the AWS encryption SDK using keys in AWS KMS to encrypt client-side command payloads before sending to the ECU.

7. AWS IoT Device Defender monitors devices connected to AWS IoT Core to detect abnormal behavior using rules and by building machine learning (ML) models. AWS IoT Device Defender can generate a finding when it detects abnormal rates of authorization failures (cloud-side metric) or anomalous traffic flow (device-side metrics) for an ECU.

8. AWS IoT Device Defender sends findings to AWS Security Hub where security findings from other AWS services and partner products are aggregated and normalized. Security Hub sends findings to EventBridge, which routes them to a remediation workflow implemented using Step Functions. You can also send findings to your vehicle security operations center.

9. The Step Functions remediation workflow can orchestrate steps such as modifying the IoT policy for the certificate and changing the certificate status to INACTIVE to disconnect the ECU.

AWS Connected Vehicle - Companion Application

Build a connected vehicle companion application to control your vehicle with AWS IoT Core and AWS AppSync.

1. The vehicle establishes an MQTT connection to the AWS IoT Core endpoint, and then subscribes to the control plane request topics to receive any cloud-side request commands. The vehicle also will publish automatically to the AWS IoT lifecycle events topic, indicating that connectivity is established.

2. The upon connection, AWS IoT Core publishes the vehicle’s connected state to the lifecycle events topic $aws/events/subscriptions/subscribed/vehicleId. This reserved topic is where connection events are published automatically upon connection.

3. When a disconnect message is received, your code should wait a period of time and verify the vehicle is still offline before taking action. When the topic receives a lifecycle event, you can enqueue a message using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) delay queues; when that message becomes available and is processed by an AWS Lambda function, you can first check if the vehicle is still offline before taking further action.

4. The connected state is then sent as a mutation to AWS AppSync, which uses a custom resolver to persist the state to an Amazon DynamoDB table. This connected state is then used for logic when a remote command is sent from a companion application.

5. Using AWS Amplify managed native applications and web applications, a remote command is sent by a secure WebSocket as a mutation to AWS AppSync. That mutation is persisted to DynamoDB and a subscription is then processed by Lambda.

6. The vehicle state Lambda then checks the connected state.

   • If connected, Lambda publishes the command payload to the request topic with a unique requestId and a response topic in the header.

   • If the device is in a disconnected state, the vehicle state Lambda then sends a command to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), which will send an SMS to the dialable MSISDN on the SIM on the TCU to indicate that a command is waiting and to wake up and subscribe to command topics.

7. Upon receipt of the command payload in the request topic, the logic is managed by a client application on the device and the result is published back to the response topic as success or failure. The response payload is then sent to an Amazon SQS first-in first-out (FIFO) queue for downstream processing by the vehicle state Lambda to ensure the messages are properly batched prior to processing.

8. The response is then processed by AWS AppSync as a mutation and persisted to DynamoDB. AWS AppSync then implements fan-out mechanism alerting the companion applications and vehicle management platforms with the updated vehicle state.

9. Optimize distribution of your companion applications placing your static assets in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and use Amazon CloudFront for distribution.

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Further reading

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Contributors

Contributors to this reference architecture diagram include:

• Andrew Givens, Senior Partner Solutions Architect, AWS

• Omar Zoma, Senior Security Solutions Architect, AWS

• Maitreya Ranganath, Principal Security Solutions Architect, AWS

• Katja-Maja Kroedel, Senior IoT Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS

Diagram history

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Change	Description	Date
Diagram updated	Minor updates to initial diagrams, added Companion Application diagram.	January 17, 2024
Initial publication	Reference architecture diagram first published.	June 23, 2023

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