Our CTO, Shadi A. Razak, recently participated in techUK’s Cyber in Connected Autonomous Vehicles event, bringing his wealth of expertise in cyber security and CAVs to an exciting and informative panel. The panel included Patricia La Torre (Humanising Autonomy), Nick Fleming (BSI) and Graeme Simpson (Roke Manor Research), who each brought a unique perspective to the discussion on CAVs.

There is no doubt that autonomous vehicles are on the rise – from consumer-driven individual cars to fleets of busses or other transportation systems. But autonomous vehicles demand a certain level of sensory input of the world around them, to guide them through roads correctly and prevent accidents. Soon, as autonomous vehicles become more and more advanced and independent, they will exist within a larger network of connections – communicating with other vehicles, traffic signals and devices.

Discussion within the panel ranged from the use of cloud and edge computing, international and national standardisations for cyber security autonomous vehicles and new perspectives on security priorities and methods. As Angoka’s goal is to creating a new norm for cybersecurity, our focus was on moving from only cyber concerns to a broader remit of digital safety, combining cyber threats (such as hackers) with physical threats (such as a road accident).

As organisations and manufacturers continue to grapple with security and safety concerns, it is important to note that the attack vectors are growing exponentially. For connected autonomous vehicles, there are three main layers of where potential attacks could take place: vehicle, infrastructure and communications. Each of those layers contains a hardware and a software vector entry point. Considering that cars today – which are starting to show some light connected abilities – have 16 points of entry for cyberattacks, it is not difficult to see how the threat surface can be expanded exponentially as CAVs progress.

However, it will still be some time before CAVs are seriously on the road in full force, giving organisations like Angoka time to consider these risks. For example, Angoka’s security solutions already provide CAVs and other IoT devices a last line of defence, directly embedded into a device’s hardware. In the post-Covid era, adoption rates could become very strong as people are starting to understand the different applications of autonomous vehicles, such as autonomous grocery or pizza deliveries during lockdown.

Ultimately, as connected autonomous vehicles continue to be developed and start to be seriously deployed, organisations and authorities must ensure that their vehicles are as secure and safe as possible. Though there’s still a lot of work to be done, there is a vast amount of opportunity for CAVs.