Overview
As indicated in the final OVERSEE paper, modern vehicles are an integral part of the daily life in industrial nations. In 2005 more than 170 million cars were registered in the European Union. Besides the use of cars for individual transport of European citizen, commercial road vehicles are an inherent part of flexible logistic chains and an additional load to the European road network.
With respect to the amount of vehicles and the vehicle miles travelled per year there are two main goals for the use of vehicles and the operation of the European road network. For one thing the number of fatalities and injuries on the road has to be reduced in order to provide safety; for another thing the use of vehicles should be as efficient as possible with regard to the emission of CO2, consumption of fossil fuels and the use of road infrastructure.
The next generation of intelligent vehicular information and communication technology (ICT) applications for advanced traffic management, active vehicle safety, or the green electric car strongly depends on the availability of an ICT infrastructure combining both dependability and security attributes. Thus, future intelligent vehicles (i) have to provide an appropriate wireless access point to their onboard IT systems and in-vehicle applications, (ii) need itself in turn appropriate access to external information and applications, and (iii) have to execute multiple independent applications with different level of criticality concurrently in a trusted manner.
To meet the challenges, OVERSEE will realize an open vehicular IT platform that provides a protected standardized in-vehicle runtime environment and onboard access and communication point. Therefore, the main objectives of the OVERSEE platform will be IT security and dependability that means enforcing a strong level of isolation between independent applications and ensuring that vehicle functionality and safety cannot be harmed by any OVERSEE application.
OVERSEE will first carry out a requirement analysis based on a security risk and dependability analysis. It will then specify the in-vehicle platform architecture based on the following key elements:
- Efficient resource virtualization that meets the stringent real-time and security requirements
- Trusted access to security services protected by a vehicular hardware security module
- Flexible trusted dynamic administration of application deployment
- Monitoring capabilities based on a trusted point of control and observations (PCO)
OVERSEE will also specify and develop the capabilities that are needed to validate future open platform implementations. This will involve assurance approach, validation tools, and run-time building blocks. Finally, OVERSEE will realize at least two novel ICT applications to proof the feasibility of the approach.