  Automotive software is increasingly complex and critical to safe vehicle
operation, and related embedded systems must remain up-to-date to ensure
long-term system performance. Update mechanisms and data modification tools
introduce opportunities for malicious actors to compromise these cyber-physical
systems, and for trusted actors to mistakenly install incompatible software
versions. A distributed and stratified "black box" audit trail for automotive
software and data provenance is proposed to assure users, service providers,
and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of vehicular software integrity and
reliability. The proposed black box architecture is both layered and diffuse,
employing distributed hash tables (DHT), a parity system and a public
blockchain to provide high resilience, assurance, scalability, and efficiency
for automotive and other high-assurance systems.
