Consortium of Crypta Labs, IDIADA UK and TeskaLabs are winners of share of £1.2 million award for cyber security of self-driving vehicles

Zenzic, the organisation dedicated to accelerating the self-driving revolution in the United Kingdom, has revealed that Crypta Labs, IDIADA UK (lead) and TeskaLabs (the “consortium”) are recipients of a share of £1.2 million in funding from a competition focused on cyber security in self-driving vehicles. The competition is part of the government’s £100 million CAM Testbed UK Fund, supporting the Future of Mobility Grand Challenge. As a key part of the UK government’s modern Industrial Strategy, the Future of Mobility Grand Challenge was announced in 2017 to encourage and support extraordinary innovation in UK engineering and technology, making the UK a world leader within the transport industries. This includes facilitating profound changes in transport technologies and business models, to make the movement of people, goods and services across the nation greener, safer, easier and more reliable.

The Cyber Security Feasibility studies competition is part-funded by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) and delivered in partnership with Innovate UK. The scope of the deliverable is to define requirements for and support the development of a connected and automated mobility (CAM) cyber security testing capabilities.

The competition will focus on three key areas:

1. Finding ways to measure and maintain cyber-physical resilience and identify vulnerabilities, which will support the creation and testing of cyber-physical and software architectures, best practice in design and lifetime management;
2. Providing specifications to support the creation of new cyber test facilities for connected and self-driving vehicles; and
3. Exploring commercial opportunities to develop new cyber-related services that can be deployed in the UK and across the global CAM marketplace.

The scope of the consortium project is to understand all the ways that a CAV would interact with other vehicles and systems in a real-world environment—not just a lab environment.

The public description of the consortium project states:

“The emergence of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) will bring unprecedented change to the automotive industry worldwide and will generate new security threats, especially those derived from the connection of the vehicle to the network. Currently there are no harmonised approaches for testing cybersecurity in the automotive sector since there is no historic information of cybersecurity risks and effects.

The project brings knowledge and wisdom to the testing of secure automated travel, in the form of identifying the requirements for a real-world test environment and evaluating the work required to bring it about. It is a feasibility study into determining how to test the interaction of CAVs with the systems they are intended to support. In other words, transporting people and goods safely, securely and efficiently in the real world.

The wide range of services that encompass CAV and their complex interaction with other vehicles and systems cannot be adequately tested just in a lab environment, but at the same time are too risky to test in a live traffic environment. A highly parameterized, but controlled, environment, is required to build confidence in the secure communications required by CAVs in near real-world conditions and the requirements to achieve this are at the core of this project.

The connected element of the CAV domain addresses many aspects of how a vehicle interacts with the wider world. This includes such things as connections to the manufacturer for maintenance of the vehicle software, to infrastructure for EV-charging access, to infrastructure for access to parking, to other vehicles for co-operative awareness applications such as collision avoidance, to other forms of road user for safety solutions, and at the edge of CAV this may also include such elements as the eCall service, and media delivery to the vehicle.

The solution to be developed as a result of the project is to describe and demonstrate a modular hardware and software platform and the means to test and evaluate the impact of C-ITS on traffic safety, driver confidence, and infrastructure development. The project will therefore bring together expertise in CAV, in automotive test facilities, in built infrastructure, and in security, with a view to ensuring the provision of CAV is for overall societal benefit and does not favour a particular sector or industry vertical.”

Crypta Labs CEO, Joe HQ Luong commented:

“We believe the work that Zenzic is doing is vital for the UK to be a global leader in accelerating early adoption of transport and CAV cybersecurity technology and it is an honour to be a part of the delivery of that roadmap.” Given the focus of the UK government on positioning the UK as a leader in CAVs and Cybersecurity testing, Crypta Labs believes that collaboration with industry partners and government is fundamental to harmonising interoperable CAV security solutions and attracting European OEMs and Tier 1 Service providers to the UK. We believe that the UK can be a leader in exporting this technology to other countries as it is relevant to both OEMs within the Automotive sector and infrastructure providers, who are delivering billions of pounds of Smart Highway projects over the next 10 years.”

Future of Transport minister, George Freeman, commented:

“The connected and self-driving vehicle sector is set to be worth £62 billion by 2030, with safer roads and smoother, more accessible journeys for all. Whether we’re turning cars into Wi-Fi connected hotspots or equipping them with millions of lines of code, we must consider the new challenges of putting this technology into practice. Today’s £1.2 million funding boost will help to guarantee the future safety and security of self-driving vehicles, both in the UK and globally.”

More information about the competition and other winners is available at zenzic.io.