Despite COVID19 restrictions, SECREDAS partners individually and collectively attended many physical and virtual conferences and fairs to present the SECREDAS project and its results. More than 100 such events have been registered and the number is still increasing. Below is a brief overview of the main consortium activities.
The 2nd Annual Technical Review meeting with the European Commission and two external evaluators took place in an unusual setting: over 100 participants joined the 2-day meeting from all over Europe via virtual TEAMS connection.
For the most part the consortium had positive news to report, despite the challenges that the COVID19 pandemic has imposed on the project. All technical deliverables due in the second year were achieved and significant progress has been made. This was shown in 46 individual recordings of demonstrations and prototypes which each focussed on mitigating parts of the Use Case threats that were defined in deliverables D1.7 and D2.1. Thus far, the results have been very encouraging. In fact, in a number of cases the technology integration which is foreseen for year 3, is already underway. This is good news considering that SECREDAS’ final year is all about HW/SW integration between consortium partners and the subsequent live ‘on-the-road’ demonstration cycles using combinations of automated vehicles and drones (acting as automated vehicles) which will take place in Helmond (Netherlands), Modena (Italy), Madrid (Spain) and Lisbon (Portugal). An overview of the achieved YR2 results is shown in this presentation:
EFECs Progress Overview Presentation – Year 2
During the meeting, we discussed the main technical challenge of physically bringing different stand-alone technologies together for the purpose of further integration. Staff from partner organisations cannot meet due to the current travel restrictions throughout Europe. Virtual meetings can only go so far. It was explained to the Commission and the evaluators that integration planning is constantly being adapted, but that there is a chance that the project may need an extension beyond its current 3-year planning to complete the demonstration programme.
Another issue that was discussed, concerns the dissemination & exploitation actions that have been planned for the 2nd and 3rd year. Where the production of high-quality publications were on track and several patents have been files/approved, most of the planned exploitation actions involved physical presence at conferences and fairs. COVID19 made most of these actions during YR2 obsolete and the consortium have had to rethink its approach. This means that the planned stakeholder forum and the large survey of end-user expectations did not take place. They will be moved to the project’s final year of activity. The reviewers were also told that SECREDAS is working with the EU-funded RESULTS BOOSTER Programme and the CYBERWATCHING.EU Programme to redefine the exploitation strategy and to work closely with other projects in the cybersecurity domain to create a number of interesting webinars.
In all, the consortium conveyed the message that the project is in good shape to increase trust of end-users in the secure and safe functioning of today’s connected and tomorrow’s automated vehicles and that their privacy when using such vehicles is well guarded.
Note: public technical deliverables created during YR2 will be posted on this website as soon as they have been formally approved following the Annual Review process. This is expected to be at the end of November 2020.
The EFECS conference in Helsinki was used to build up closer ties to several other ECSEL projects and to establish closer collaboration with the Lighthouse Mobility.E initiative. We also organised our first stakeholder session to collect input what the major Security and Privacy concerns are from both users and developers of high-tech automated systems as they become more and more interconnected. The key-note speaker was Gerard Doll, the director of vehicle regulation and admission for the RDW (The Dutch Vehicle Authority). The interactive workshop collected concerns from different stakeholders such as certification bodies, governments, end-users, manufacturers, tier-1 suppliers and discussed directions for future solutions. The results feed directly into the work done by the different work packages.
The November consortium meeting in Munich (4/12/2019) focussed mainly on confirming and aligning the cross-work package groups to ensure a smooth transitioning of technical results. The partners also received detailed information on the technical requirements for inclusion of individual components and systems into the three main field tests. Overall we witnessed a further increase in the
SECREDAS was presented at the upcoming EFECS Conference in Bucharest. This time not with its own booth, as focus was on the project’s own annual consortium meeting in June, but several partners were present to represent the project. A poster was shown in the exhibition hall.
The first SECREDAS Newsletter came out in May. The newsletter is published every 3 months and sent to all project participants. A copy of each newsletter will also be placed on the website.
With a consortium of – now – 73 partners, the completion of the project Consortium Agreement was always bound to take a while. However, we did it! Congratulations to all partners who did excellent work and showed real commitment and constructive thinking!
SECREDAS was well-represented at the 2nd exhibition stage of the European Forum for Electronic Components and Systems 2018 (EFECS 2018) conference in Lisbon. The conference was held from 19-21 November and focussed on digital transformation by supporting the development of technology solutions along the entire Electronic Components and Systems (ECS) value chain.
The SECREDAS booth, located right at the entrance of the project exhibition hall, attracted significant attention, even though it was too soon for the project to be able to show any demonstrators. Many of the SECREDAS partners also attended the conference and used the booth as a convenient meeting point to establish interesting contacts.
A very successful second SECREDAS consortium meeting took place at IMEC in Leuven. Through plenary sessions and specific outbreak sessions, the activities of the 69 partner organisations across the 11 work packages was aligned. The summer break initially caused a delay in the start of some work packages; the consortium meeting was there to mitigate any potential knock-on effects and to confirm a new timetable that will allow the project as a whole to remain on track. Other points of discussion concerned some changes to the WorkPlan following the departure of german partner CommSolid (due to lack of national co-funding). The General Assembly gave its approval to the accession of two new partners, Stackforce and Exelonix, who have agreed to take over most of Commsolid’s activities, with existing partner Senetics covering the rest.
The ECSEL SECREDAS project has been launched! Following successful contract negotiations with the ECSEL Office, the consortium of 69 partner organisations met in Munich on 16-17 May 2018 to discuss the project work plan and assign specific tasks and responsibilities. Over €51 Million will be spent in three years to develop reference architecture for Secure and Safe Automated systems compliant with the new GDPR Regulation.
In addition, on the 19th June the project was presented in Brussels. At this occasion, Bert De Colvenaer, Executive Director of the ECSEL JU said that “SECREDAS is one of the first ECSEL JU funded projects which looks at security, safety and privacy across multiple application domains. The new European GDPR- regulation provides the opportunity to develop future technologies able to answer to urgent safety, security and privacy concerns. The ECSEL JU programme demonstrates once again its flexibility to take up new challenges”.
In this workshop we will discuss safety, cybersecurity and privacy issues related to the automotive and connected autonomous vehicle sector, as well as in Health and Railways. The SECREDAS partners have been active in various standardization committees and working groups in ISO, IEC and ETSI, but also in related standardization work of IEEE and others. Topics relevant to the SECREDAS project included generic safety, cybersecurity standards, domain-specific standards and new upcoming ones concerning smart mobility (c-ITS, AI and functional safety, Connected and ExVe (Extended Vehicle) safety, Safety of automated driving systems), guidelines for personal data management and also ethical aspects of connected and automated driving or of any other highly automated system using AI technology. The workshop will provide an overview of the work and contributions of SECREDAS partners and future aspects to be taken up beyond the SECREDAS project.
Workshop moderator: Erwin Schoitsch, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
Workshop 3 will discuss how the SECREDAS partners have been able to create a common reference in Risk Analysis and Architecture to satisfy the Automotive ecosystem needs for simultaneous and integrated safety, security and privacy design. Our approach has been based on building on shared best practices and addresses many technical issues identified by multiple stakeholders and companies.
Workshop moderator: Jean-Loup Dépinay, IDEMIA
a) In-vehicle networking components: In this workshop we will showcase the demonstrator for a particular SECREDAS use-case that will “Keep car secure” for the whole vehicle product lifetime. The demonstrator that we created, shows how a rogue command from a safety critical device is blocked. We will also highlight which specific technologies are exploited for a secure firmware-over-the-air update of electronic modules in a vehicle. We will then explain how developed components have been integrated to show the update of the transmission pass list from a selected secure CAN transceiver in response to a field attack.
Workshop moderator: Armand Stuivenwold, NXP Semiconductors
b) Radar 5G and Lidar approaches: In this talk, we first consider a communicating radar system, referred to as a RadCom system, that overcomes the drawbacks of existing radar techniques, while using the same system for inter vehicular communication. In this context we compare conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC), a new 5G waveform candidate, as a suitable RadCom waveform that offers a good trade-off between performance and complexity. Then we also propose multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) as a multiple-access (MA) technique that can offer great performance in terms of multiuser detection and power efficiency. Finally, we study how UFMC f ilter length and MC-CDMA spreading sequences can impact overall performance on both radar and communication separately under a multipath channel.
In other complementary studies, we also explore key algorithmic blocks that could allow multi-carrier mmWave communicating systems to localize multiple vehicles and passive obstacles over V2I links, thus enabling extended and synergetic RadComLoc capabiliies. These features concern e.g., joint beams optimization and resource allocation, the fast estimation of sparse mmWave multipath parameters or simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms.
Workshop moderator: Sylvie Mayrargue - CEA-LETI
c) Sensing technologies and methods to monitor personal health and driver performance:The driver’s role in autonomous vehicles remains essential as they must take control in case of emergency or system failures. The vehicle’s cockpit will be equipped with systems to monitor the driver’s drowsiness, alertness, stress and distraction. Such systems will rely on continuously measuring the driver’s physiological parameters, including heartbeat, respiration and sweat, as well as the driver’s behaviour and responses. We will discuss different technologies developed in SECREDAS to sense such physiological parameters and to extract information on the driver’s suitability to take control of the vehicle at any time.
Workshop moderator: Miguel Glassee – IMEC Belgium
In this workshop we share the most striking results we obtained from surveying the technology providers and broader stakeholder groups on aspects related to human factors, the wider possible societal implications, and conceivable legal connections. You will also have an opportunity to provide further feedback and comments.
Workshop moderator: Sven Maerivoet, Transport & Mobility Leuven
The SECREDAS partners are proud to present the findings of their technology integration efforts and the live demonstrations that were carried out to validate that we are able to avoid or mitigate a range of security, safety and privacy threats that might otherwise occur when using automated vehicles. We will show how our technologies contribute to higher consumer trust levels in future generations of automated vehicles. All demonstrated technology components and integrated systems during the presentation are also shown and demonstrated in the symposium section of the conference.
The following SECREDAS three integrated technology Demonstrators will be presented:
Demonstration I focusses on six different external threat scenario’s which occupants of automated vehicles might encounter. All mitigation actions shown in the workshop demonstrate how we ensure safe and cyber secure V2X communication to protect the safety of all nearby road users, not just the vehicle under attack. Five threat scenarios were demonstrated on a public intersection directly next to the Helmond Automotive Campus; the final scenario was tested and validated at a dedicated test roundabout in Modena.
Demonstration II targets the safe handling of a situation in which the driver is unfit to take over the control of a semi-autonomous vehicle. The demonstration, including several sub-scenario’s took place at the CSIC testing premises in Madrid.
Demonstration III addresses the issue of secure car sharing. The focus has been to mitigate threats and challenges related to secure authentication and authorization during reservation of a shared vehicle. The actual live demonstration took place at IMA premises in Prague.
Demonstration IV focuses on rail-domain specific secure computing environment aiming for very high safety levels (SIL4). The presented solution takes advantage of virtualization, COTS hardware and cloud technologies to reduce total costs associated with the safety-critical components and solutions.
Demonstration V shows how validation of selected security and safety related scenarios can be performed without risks and costs related to use of cars and public road infrastructure - taking advantage of drones. Presented is the Drone Scenario Builder replication capability of selected scenarios from Demonstration I and use of Drone Security and Privacy Framework to address security and privacy issues related to V2X communications and WAN connectivity. The actual live demonstration is planned to be shown during the conference on a remote location.
The deployment of connected and cooperative services (services based on the exchange of data between vehicles and their surrounding environment and the cloud) is taking momentum following the European initiatives in piloting the deployment of Cooperative ITS services (C-Roads, InterCor based on CEN, ISO and ETSI standards, mass deployment by Volkswagen and road operators). In this workshop, we are going to discuss how SECREDAS followed this trend in addressing the security issues related to vehicle connectivity, both for cloud-based communications, V2X localized communications between vehicles and the roadside infrastructure and IoT devices integration. We will discuss the contributions of SECREDAS in terms of analysis, prototyping, proof of concept, integration, demonstrations and standardization.
In Secredas several user scenarios were developed that cover the crossroads of security, safety and privacy protection. A recap of the 4 automotive scenarios, health scenario, and rail scenario will be given, and the chosen approach to work with these scenarios will be compared to the approaches in other EU projects. Lessons learned from the comparison will be presented in the second part of the workshop. Since 2018, each year an Electronic Components and Systems (ECS) - Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) sets the strategic priorities and technical pathways to enable European industry to become stronger and more competitive. The ECS-SRA acts as a tool to realise an industry-driven, long-term vision of the ECS ecosystem, as well as to match the allocation of programs and resources to different technology challenges. In the final part of the workshop, a reflection of Secredas to the 2018-2021 SRAs will be made.
