The objective of the EVITA project is to design, verify, and create a prototype of a secure architecture for automotive on-board electronics networks. Thus, EVITA will provide a basis for the secure deployment of electronic safety aids based on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.

Policy Context

EVITA is co-funded by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development.Focussing on on-board network protection, EVITA complements other e-safety related projects that focus on protecting the communication of vehicles with the outside.

Description of target users and groups

The intended primary beneficiaries of the EVITA results are car, truck, and motorcycle manufacturers, automotive electronics suppliers, and semi-conductor manufacturers. Also industry consortia such as the Car 2 Car Communication Consortium and other organisations dedicated to electronic car safety aids are intended to benefit from the EVITA results. In a broader sense, by helping to reduce road transport problems, the EVITA results are intended to benefit the society as a whole. Secondary beneficiaries of EVITA results are all industries that have to cope with communication security problems similar to that in the automotive sector. Similarly complex communication networks are embedded in systems such as airplanes, power stations, robots, and house control systems.

Technology solution

Starting from relevant use cases and security threat scenarios, EVITA specifies security requirements for automotive on-board networks and considers also legal requirements on privacy, data protection, and liability issues. Based on these security requirements and the automotive constraints, EVITA designs a secure on-board architecture and secure on-board communications protocols. The security functions are partitioned between software and hardware. The root of trust is placed in hardware security modules realised as extensions to automotive controllers.

In order to ensure that the identified requirements are satisfied, EVITA models and verifies selected parts of the secure on-board architecture and the communications protocols using model-based verification tools.

For prototyping, FPGA's will be used to extend standard automotive controllers with the functionality of cryptographic coprocessors. The secure on-board network will be deployed inside a lab car demonstrating e-safety applications based on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.

Technology choice: Mainly (or only) open standards

Main results, benefits and impacts

Specification of a secure automotive on-board hardware/software architecture and secure on-board communications protocols

Track record of sharing

In order tfor the entire automotive industry to benefit from the project results, the secure on-board architecture and communications protocol specifications are published on http://evita-project.org as open specifications. The EVITA project partners liaise with related initiatives in the fields of e-safety and embedded security to achieve multilateral synergies.

Lessons learnt

The project is still in progress. We may document lessons learnt after the end of the project.

Scope: International