Connected vehicle technology is an essential enabler for safer roads and future autonomous vehicle deployments. Direct vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) digital wireless communication (collectively referred to as V2X) enables vehicles to communicate with each other and roadside equipment. The technology is also a valuable enabler that accelerates the deployment of practical automated and driver assist solutions.
V2X is built on an underlying infrastructure of secure, reliable, two-way authenticated messages among vehicles and roadside equipment. ETAS has been leading the effort in securing V2X communications. As technical security experts for several international V2X pilot projects, ETAS has been helping to define the specifications around the Security Credentials Management System (SCMS), the security infrastructure behind V2X.
Security credentials management – Enabling the benefits of V2X
In order to function safely, V2X needs a security infrastructure to ensure the trustworthiness of communication of every message. Specifically, the source of each message needs to be trusted and the message content needs to be protected from outside interference or modification.
In order to create the required environment of trust requires the use of digital signatures to protect the integrity of the message content and certificates to validate the integrity of the sender.
The SCMS is the infrastructure that has been designed specifically to enable V2X capabilities. Its design is built on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) technology and best practices with novel extensions that support privacy and large-scale deployment. The ETAS team is comprised of world leading experts in ECC and embedded security technologies and is the reason we are the technical security experts behind securing V2X communications.
Large scale infrastructure and privacy protection
When fully deployed, the V2X security infrastructure will be the largest public key system ever deployed, by several orders of magnitude. ETAS’ expertise in large scale mobile and embedded applications helps ensure the design is robust and scalable.
The security design supports a distributed architecture that allows separation of roles so that automobile manufacturers (OEMs) and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) managers can operate independently while sharing a common root of trust. The goal of the system is to ensure that all vehicles and roadside equipment can reliably exchange authenticated messages even if they are managed by different organizations that have no formal relationships. The design also protects privacy to ensure anonymity of drivers.
Driving international ITS pilots
ETAS‘ solutions and expertise are the basis for the V2X security infrastructure of many international ITS pilot projects. In North America we are under contract with the US Department of Transport to support - in close collaboration with the members of CAMP (Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership) – the various connected vehicle pilots.
In Europe, ETAS is the security provider for the Cooperative ITS Corridor pilot project. Within the scope of the project, ETAS was commissioned by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) to provide the public key infrastructure (PKI) that safeguards V2X communication in the corridor.
We ensure that only trustworthy vehicles and roadside infrastructure communicate
- Complete solution: ETAS provides solutions for embedded on-board equipment in vehicles and roadside infrastructure as well as the backend security infrastructure to manage the overall security
- Easy to deploy and manage: Turnkey service that scales seamlessly from small early-stage deployments to full-production support.
- Standards compliant: Provides a standards compliant implementation adhering to North American and European standards. One platform to issue and manage North American or European standard certificates.
- Easy to integrate: Solutions encapsulate all the complexities associated with implementing the security infrastructure and transactions so that the host V2X application does not have to handle those details including effective isolation of the host application from ongoing and future changes to the security specifications and protocols.
- High performance: Components that can scale to manage millions of vehicles and road side equipment, and which supports rigorous automotive production requirements
- Reduced deployment risk: Full implementation of all V2X security protocols and certificate management functions including production ready enrollment process and DCM (Device Configuration Manager)
- Robust: Leverages ETAS’ extensive expertise in embedded security design within the automotive domain, including meeting the rigorous demands of software and system design for safety critical applications.
