Safe and Secure DMS

Driver Monitoring System on the rise
Drowsiness and distraction are two major factors that contribute to high rates of traffic accidents. Having a driver monitoring system that can detect fatigue and lack of attention behind the wheel, can improve driver safety.  For example, a camera system attached to a steering wheel is capable of recognizing that the driver is not paying attention to the road ahead and sends an alert to the instrument cluster.  The response is a light or sound warning signal and may even force the car to slow down or brake.  Such Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS) are about to conquer the market, as they become a mandatory feature.  At the same time, automotive manufacturers and ECU suppliers are under constant pressure to reduce hardware to minimize weight and volume of the car to reduce costs. How can these opposing goals be resolved?

Converging a DMS on top of a cockpit controller using a hypervisor?
OpenSynergy offers a cockpit solution that integrates the instrument cluster software and in-vehicle infotainment system (IVI), with both running in separate virtual machines generated by the COQOS Hypervisor.  COQOS Hypervisor can host an additional virtual machine to run the DMS software.  The separation of the DMS from the infotainment system ensures that the functionality is not affected, even in case the IVI is attacked by malicious software.  Inter-VM-communication enables the transfer of the data collected by the DMS to the virtual machine running the instrument cluster – where it displays a warning to the driver – or to the IVI – where, for example, customized settings are loaded (e.g. user specific colors, mood dependent music, etc.)
All three systems – instrument cluster, IVI and DMS – are running on the same hardware, but are safely separated thanks to the hypervisor. Each system has a different safety requirement:  the instrument cluster requires ASIL-B level as it needs to ensure that safety relevant information is always displayed to the user. On the other hand the DMS requires ASIL-A level, as it has to perform a safety relevant activity (monitor the driver’s drowsiness). The IVI does not require any ASIL level.
Furthermore the hypervisor ensures that three systems are securely separated. The DMS for example runs the user facial recognition software, but does not provide sensitive user information to the IVI, instead it only provides a limited enciphered information. Since the facial recognition database containing personal and sensitive data of the driver is integrated in DMS VM, this information needs to be securely separated from the rest of the system.

The automotive virtual platform makes it possible
Because OpenSynergy’s COQOS Hypervisor SDK virtual platform relies on the open standard VIRTIO, it is simple to integrate the DMS system into the automotive IVI as virtual machines. VIRTIO was originally developed for enterprise virtualization workloads and cloud computing that puts a high demand on data processing performance.  With the increasing amount of data also given by driver assistance features such as camera streaming data used for DMS and IVI system, OpenSynergy sees an ideal fit in VIRTIO for the integration of the upcoming mandatory feature. With its open source activities, OpenSynergy is advocating for the adoption of VIRTIO in the automotive domain.

Continues to perform well
The RTOS or Linux-based instrument cluster and the Android-based infotainment system and the Linux-based DMS – run side-by-side on one single high performance System-on-Chip. While additional resources (e.g. RAM, CPU, flash) need to be taken into account for the DMS functionality, COQOS Hypervisor, as a type-1 hypervisor, does not require significant overhead.