Series 9 – Episode 10 – How can we make connected cars resilient to attacks?

Recent news that vehicles on public roads could be controlled by terrorists and used as remote weapons has stirred up some necessary concern. But connected-autonomous vehicles are central to the development of smart cities, and they are only going to become more popular. If we’re to advance in driverless cars, user trust is paramount.

Zimmer said: “The industry has to continue what they’re doing already…and know that they have to continue to work on finding the right solutions.

“The difficult question, I would say, is how can security be simplified? Well, you could simplify it by limiting it and saying which connectivity do I really need? You can also simplify it by saying, I have to communicate but what kind of information do I really have to communicate?”

Automotive designers could allow the systems only to get access to what they really need to do the job and no more or less. It is also important to use the latest technology as security is constantly evolving and systems that have been secure for three years are no longer secure – with new technology, they can now be hacked.

BlackBerry’s safety-certified embedded software, QNX, is now embedded in over 215 million vehicles worldwide. It has been chosen by a myriad of household names, including BMW, Mercedes Benz, Honda, and Toyota, to protect their IoT systems in automotive vehicles by delivering the knowledge from its field-proven cybersecurity experts into each car. Automakers rely on BlackBerry QNX software for a broad range of critical systems for the vehicles of today and for the next generation software-defined vehicles of the future. 

Zimmer goes on to talk about how Blackberry’s solutions connect all the parts of a vehicle and allow them to communicate with each other without the threat of interference from a hacker, as well as the BlackBerry QNX Autonomous Vehicle Innovation Centre and how it transforms concepts into reality.

To hear more about making connected cars resilient to attacks and much more, you can listen to Electronic Specifier’s interview with Joerg Zimmer on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.