AAOS SDV - Secure by Design

Posted by Markus Vill, Software Engineer, Sean Keys, Security Engineer, and Istvan Nador, Software Engineer, Android AutoAt Google, we believe our products should be secure by design, which is why we built the Android Automotive Operating System for Software Defined Vehicle (AAOS SDV) on existing, market-proven platforms, leveraging virtualization technologies like Cuttlefish. While our release announcements focused on the features, this blog post outlines some of the security concepts. Foundation: Domain IsolationVirtualization to isolate co-hosted instancesThe current trend of consolidating Electronic Control Units (ECUs) into a single chip reduces isolation by running multiple domains side-by-side. While AAOS SDV instances provide internal isolation mechanisms, it is often preferable to run logical domains independently. For instance, a cluster and an infotainment system have distinct requirements. We use virtual machines to run multiple instances in parallel, ensuring that sharing remains explicit and isolation is the default behavior. Inherited Android Security AAOS SDV evolved from Microdroid, a minimalistic Android version optimized for privacy virtual machines (pVM). This lineage provides Android platform engineers with established security features they already know. Process Isolation & Deny by Default AAOS SDV follows Android’s User ID (UID)-based isolation model to set up a sandbox for each application. Each service runs in a dedicated process with a unique UID to manage access rights, data directories, and other restrictions. We employ Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) capabilities to strictly limit operations and pair this with Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to enforce a "deny-by-default" posture. This approach restricts each service to the ab...

Original source: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/08/aaos-sdv-secure-by-design.html
Publisher: Android Developers Blog