Secure-CAV

Secure-CAV is an ambitious collaborative project that aims to improve the safety and security of tomorrow’s connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs): and in doing so, ultimately advance the wellbeing of our citizens and infrastructure.

The project addresses one of the most pressing “pain points” in the transportation industry: cybersecurity. Today, we are moving progressively through increased levels of driver assistance, with the eventual aim of deploying full autonomy. The electronic content of vehicles is therefore growing rapidly. Vehicles are also increasingly connected, becoming effectively IoT-style devices.

The result of all this is that the opportunities for malicious actors to hack into vehicles’ systems are becoming greater. And at the same time, the potential consequences of failing to detect and mitigate such attacks are skyrocketing: a compromised autonomous vehicle is no mere inconvenience, it is a potential threat to life.

The Secure-CAV project seeks to answer these challenges by developing cybersecurity solutions that can be embedded deep in the underlying electronic hardware within a CAV. To do so, it brings together a multidisciplinary team:
- Cybersecurity specialist consultancy Copper Horse will model cybersecurity scenarios, to identify the most likely and consequential modes of attack. Throughout the lifetime of the project, the company’s experts will continue to monitor the threat landscape, and test the robustness of our results
- Leading hardware-based cybersecurity provider UltraSoC will develop the semiconductor IP which will form the underlying foundation of our CAV cybersecurity solution
- Machine Learning (ML) experts from the University of Southampton will work alongside UltraSoC engineers to develop algorithms and code to intelligently identify security and safety issues
- The Institute of Future Transport at Coventry University will develop a testbed demonstrator representing a full-scale automotive functional architecture to prove the resulting solutions

The socio-economic impacts of cybersecurity attacks are tremendous, with the automotive industry estimated to lose £20 billion annually by 2023 [Upstream Security]. Co-funded by the UK’s innovation agency Innovate UK, the Secure-CAV project is tackling a very real market and societal need with new thinking and technology.