PROFESSIONAL-CLOUD-ARCHITECT · Question #168
Case Study: 2 - TerramEarth Case Study Company Overview TerramEarth manufactures heavy equipment for the mining and agricultural industries: About 80% of their business is from mining and 20% from…
The correct answer is A. Treat every micro service call between modules on the vehicle as untrusted. C. Use a trusted platform module (TPM) and verify firmware and binaries on boot. TerramEarth vehicles require zero-trust inter-module communication and hardware-rooted firmware integrity to protect against physical and software-level attacks.
Question
Options
- ATreat every micro service call between modules on the vehicle as untrusted.
- BRequire IPv6 for connectivity to ensure a secure address space.
- CUse a trusted platform module (TPM) and verify firmware and binaries on boot.
- DUse a functional programming language to isolate code execution cycles.
- EUse multiple connectivity subsystems for redundancy.
- FEnclose the vehicle's drive electronics in a Faraday cage to isolate chips.
How the community answered
(36 responses)- A64% (23)
- B19% (7)
- D6% (2)
- E3% (1)
- F8% (3)
Why each option
TerramEarth vehicles require zero-trust inter-module communication and hardware-rooted firmware integrity to protect against physical and software-level attacks.
Treating every microservice call between vehicle modules as untrusted implements a zero-trust network model, requiring authentication and authorization for each inter-module communication and preventing lateral movement if one module is compromised.
IPv6 provides a larger address space but does not inherently provide security; address exhaustion is not the threat model for vehicle firmware.
A Trusted Platform Module (TPM) provides hardware-backed cryptographic verification of firmware and bootloader integrity at startup, ensuring that only signed, unmodified software runs on vehicle control systems, which is critical for safety-critical embedded systems.
Functional programming languages do not provide hardware-level security guarantees or protect against firmware-level attacks on vehicle systems.
Redundant connectivity improves uptime but does not address security threats to the vehicle's software or firmware integrity.
A Faraday cage blocks electromagnetic signals but does not protect against software-level exploits or firmware tampering via physical maintenance ports.
Concept tested: Zero-trust and TPM-based security for IoT/embedded vehicle systems
Source: https://cloud.google.com/architecture/iot-overview
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