ISO 21434 Functional Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity engineering is a critical discipline to ensure safe and secure human experiences using cyber physical systems. The main challenge is to preserve trust for connected cyber systems in an evolving digital economy increasingly threatened by unpredictable events.

Systems Cybersecurity Designer allows you to identify assets to be protected, threats and attacks to be tackled, and cybersecurity requirements to mitigate identified risks. The Systems Cybersecurity Designer supports the ISO/SAE 21434 standard. It enables a proactive and continuous security assessment in the initial design phase to reduce product development cost and time. Systems cybersecurity designers are able to create a Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment (TARA) project template to comply with the ISO/SAE 21434:2021.

The ISO/SAE 21434:2021 standard specifies engineering requirements for cybersecurity risk management regarding the Concept, Product development, Production, Operations, and maintenance and decommissioning of electrical and electronic (E/E) systems in road vehicles. This standard includes the integral components and interfaces of the road vehicles. A framework includes requirements for cybersecurity processes and a common language for communicating and managing cybersecurity risk. It is applicable to electrical and electronic (E/E) systems of production road vehicles whose development or modification began after the publication of ISO/SAE 21434:2021. ISO/SAE 21434:2021 does not prescribe specific technology or solutions related to cybersecurity.

The Systems Cybersecurity Designer allows a cybersecurity designer to:

• Design a safe and secure system through a built-in scalable cyber system model, which includes assets, weaknesses, threats, attack paths, and security requirements.
• Perform continuous threat assessment and hazard analyses to enhance design through real world scenarios.
• Support certification needs with consistent safety and cybersecurity compliance views.

The Systems Cybersecurity Designer directly covers the following parts of the standard:

9. Concept 

This chapter specifies the item with its cybersecurity goals and claims. It is composed of cybersecurity requirements and the operational environment requirements of an item.

15. Threat analysis and risk assessment methods

This chapter specifies the methods to determine the extent to which a threat scenario can impact a road user. These methods and their work products are known as Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment (TARA) and are performed from the viewpoint of affected road users. The TARA steps are generic modules that can be invoked systematically from any point in the lifecycle of an item or component.

Overview of ISO/SAE 21434:2021 standard