For application developers, data forensics will be increasingly important in determining the traces left behind in a connected car hack, including malicious code. Aside from who was behind the attack, they also need to consider the means used. This includes communication channels like WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB that are making their way into cars via OBD2 ports, which are shown on this infographic by Arxan about IoT-related application protection for cars and software in other industries.

Arxan Connected Car Vulnerabilities

Connected vehicles like the autonomous car in Tesla’s latest effort to plan a long road trip around the US are aware of each other and their own surroundings through sensors. The auto industry has used sensors for many years to monitor vitals like engine performance, but much fewer than the high-resolution cameras and other means of tracking the vehicle’s distance between it and other objects you see on the top of driverless cars today.

Recent efforts by manufacturers to make their connected cars perform better through advanced sensor technology have been undertaken by Tata Motors and Ford. Testing in the UK, Jaguar Land Rover, a subsidiary of Tata Motors, is working on allowing cars to speed ahead of slower vehicles without the driver’s intervention.

More sophisticated sensors also require more complex code, meaning that all applications used in Internet-of-Things technologies should be held to the same encryption standards. End-to-end encryption is a way of making sure that a third party can’t intercept communication between two people–and something that business app developers can use to protect sensitive company information.