Secure Vehicle Communication

Acronym of the case:

SeVeCom

Web address of the case:

http://www.sevecom.org/

Country of the case:

Belgium , France , Germany , Hungary , Italy , Switzerland

City/region:

Europe

Posting Date:

19 October 2009

Last Edited Date:

22 February 2010

Author:

Barbara Raither (TRIALOG)

esecurity | privacy | communication

Type of initiative

Project or service

Case Abstract

SeVeCom is a research project that focused on providing a full definition and implementation of security requirements for vehicular communications.Â It terminated in early 2009 and was funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme.

The SeVeCom vision is that future vehicule-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication infrastructures will be widely deployed in order to bring the promise of improved road safety and optimized road traffic.Â Â

SeVeCom addresses security of the future vehicle communication networks, including both the security and privacy of inter-vehicular communication and of the vehicle-infrastructure communication.Â Its objective is to define the security architecture of such networks, as well as to propose a roadmap for integration of security functions in these networks.

With the goal of enhancing the immunity of future road safety applications against a wide range of security threats, SeVeCom focused on communications specific to road traffic. Three major aspects were examined:

threats, such as bogus information, denial of service or identity cheating.
requirements, like authentication, availability, and privacy.
operational Properties, including network scale, privacy, cost and trust.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

eIdentity and eSecurity | Infrastructure

Sector

Communication (infrastructure) | Travel, Transports and Motoring

Date

January 2006 to January 2009

Date operational

January 2006

Target Users

Business (industry) | Business (SME) | Citizen

Target Users Description

The target group includes individual vehicle drivers as well as the entire traffic control infrastructure.Â The latter can include manufacturers and government authorities, as well as law makers and standards organisations.Â

Scope

Cross-border | Pan-European

Status

Ended

Language(s)

English

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The SeVeCom project is part of the eSafety initiative, the Information Society Technologies initiative, and the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission.Â

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

IT infrastructures and products

Overall Implementation approach

Partnerships between administration and/or private sector and/or non-profit sector

Technology choice

Proprietary technology | Standards-based technology | Open source software

Funding source

Public funding EU

Technology solution

Sevecom focused on communications specific to road traffic. This included messages related to traffic information, anonymous safety-related messages, and liability-related messages. The following research and innovation work was carried out:

Identification of the variety of threats: attacker's model and potential vulnerabilities; in particular, study of attacks against the radio channel and transferred data, but also against the vehicle itself through internal attacks, e.g., against TCU (Telematics Control Unit), ECU (Electronic Control Unit) and the internal control bus.
Specification of an architecture and of security mechanisms which provide the right level of protection. It will address issues such as the apparent contradiction between liability and privacy, or the extent to which a vehicle can check the consistency of claims made by other vehicles. The following topics were fully addressed : Key and identity management, Secure communication protocols (including secure routing), Tamper proof
device and decision on crypto-system, Privacy. The following topics were investigated in preparation of further work: Intrusion Detection, Data consistency, Secure positioning, Secure user interface.
The definition of cryptographic primitives which take into account the specific operational environment. The challenge is to address:

Â (1) the variety of threats,

Â (2) the sporadic connectivity created by moving vehicles and the resulting real-time constraints,

Â (3) the low-cost requirements of embedded systems vehicles

The listed concepts were integrated into a complete security architecture for V2V/V2I systems and implemented in a fully functional prototype based on existing V2V/V2I hardware and software provided by BMW and Denso.