VITAF

Cars are becoming increasingly connected to one another and to the outside world; today’s vehicles are equipped with a wide range of sensors and control units, all of which can send and receive data. Cars are already driving semi-autonomously, and fully autonomous driving will be possible in the near future. Therefore, both data communication and data processing must be well secured.

In particular, motor vehicles need comprehensive protection against hacking attacks that can breach their systems, manipulate them, and potentially cause accidents. Until now, security concepts have often failed because the control units and sensors in cars have insufficient computing power—for example, to provide cryptographic protection for data. New forms of locally distributed data processing (edge or fog computing) are now opening up new possibilities.

Project Goal

The goal of the VITAF project is to develop a system that quickly detects hacker attacks on autonomous vehicles and initiates effective countermeasures. In doing so, data exchange between the vehicles and their infrastructure must not be interrupted, ensuring safe operation in traffic even in the event of a cyberattack. Various communication protocols are being established to ensure secure data transmission: between individual control units within the vehicle itself, between different vehicles (Vehicle-to-Vehicle [V2V]), and between vehicles and infrastructure, such as traffic management systems (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure, [V2I]). Data from many different sensors is to be analyzed and examined for anomalies in data communication. Existing, proven approaches from IT, such as data encryption using cryptographic methods, are being further developed and applied to the automotive sector.

The project also addresses legal issues related to autonomous driving. Data protection concerns are taken into account right from the design phase, such as problems that may arise from obscuring vehicle identity with pseudonymized tokens. The newly developed technology is finally evaluated using a demonstrator developed specifically for this purpose.

Architecture for Trusted Communication

In the VITAF project, Fraunhofer SIT is developing a concept to secure in-vehicle nodes in order to instantiate secure identities within the vehicle, which will ensure the authenticity of communication partners and the integrity of data in in-vehicle communication. Based on these trust anchors, novel methods and procedures for validating IT security are being developed, which serve to enable intelligent attack detection via edge computing and utilize the decentralized computing power in autonomous vehicles for the machine-based adaptation of attack classifiers.

Specifically, secure identities can be used not only to authenticate oneself to a third party, but also to verify one’s own status and communicate it to a third party. This enables the third party to make statements regarding the platform’s overall trustworthiness. Here, Fraunhofer SIT can contribute expertise from the field of trusted computing and, for example, evaluate the potential applications of hardware components such as TPMs.