Integrity of virtual testing for crash protection

The interest in virtual testing is globally rapidly increasing because of several advantages compared to physical tests in laboratories. In the area of passive car safety, finite element simulations can be used to get further insights, use more biofidelic human models and make the overall assessment more robust by incorporating more variety in the virtual testing load cases. For a successful implementation of virtual testing in regulations or consumer information, the integrity of the procedure has to be ensured. As car simulation models used within the virtual testing are usually not shared with the evaluation institutions due to intellectual property (IP) issues, this is a challenging task. Stringent validation and certification procedures are needed and it has to be ensured that the models used in these steps are the same as the ones used for the virtual testing. In this paper, we developed a secure procedure for model version control. Through analysis of possible threats for both sides, car manufacturer and evaluation institution, we defined requirements, which the new procedure should satisfy. These requirements state that the integrity and authenticity of all shared documents should be protected, as well as the confidentiality of the simulation model. By considering all prerequisites, we developed an architecture for a new procedure. This architecture uses cryptographic algorithms such as hash functions and digital signatures to ensure integrity and authenticity, as well as secure computation mechanisms such as Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). In our proof-of-concept implementation, we demonstrated how a secure wrapper around LS-DYNA can produce a signed report to authenticate the input model files based on a hash tree and link them to the simulation results. The evaluation institution can use a matching verification tool to verify that the models were not manipulated compared to other simulation runs or the qualification process. The developed procedure can be used for trustworthy implementation of virtual testing into consumer information or regulation for the assessment of car safety with strengthened integrity. Further research is needed to develop comparable procedures for other simulation software packages or ideally integrate it directly into the simulation software.