Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CONNECT (Continuous and Efficient Cooperative Trust Management for Resilient CCAM)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29
The 5G C-V2X technology is expected to greatly enhance autonomous driving through perception sharing, path planning, real-time local updates, and coordinated driving. These features facilitate the next generation of ITS solutions for cooperative autonomous driving applications (e.g. intersection movement assist, fleet management systems, cooperative routing, and parking services), and greatly reduce emissions. The core of the smart transportation vision revolves around an integrated communication and transportation network that promotes several societal benefit sand shapes a new era of advanced road safety, enhanced personal mobility, and environmental sustainability. However, in order for this vision to materialize, security and trustworthiness are key properties of such a system. This is where CONNECT’s core contributions lie: CONNECT addresses the convergence of security and safety in CCAM by assessing dynamic trust relationships and defining a trust model and trust reasoning framework based on which
involved entities can establish trust for cooperatively executing safety-critical functions.
involved entities can establish trust for cooperatively executing safety-critical functions.
Towards this direction, CONNECT designed an overarching Trust Assessment Framework (TAF) capable of CCAM-wide trust quantification by introducing adaptive-to-changes mechanisms for capturing vehicles’ trust scores, anchored to decentralized roots-of-trust, and subsequently elevated carefully to the CCAM level. These mechanisms are based on the adoption of advanced (HW-based) trusted computing primitives (CONNECT attestation extensions) for enabling the conversion of such complex ecosystems intro trustable (heterogeneous) communication environments allowing for the continuous trust assessment of all involved entities and stakeholders. The core foundation behind this design (as part of CONNECT’s established Architecture Reference Framework) is to facilitate the realization of a higher level of automation in connected cars and services envisioning the exchange of rich information between vehicles and the backend infrastructure towards the delivery of more accurate services that can greatly enhance the safety profile of a user on the road.
In this context, CONNECT is one of the first solutions that considers the composition of infrastructure entities extending from the traditional view of cloud-based services (including applications such as traffic control centres and/or intersection movement assistance services) and centralized security solutions (such as PKIs) to also align with the vision of disaggregating the services over the entire compute continuum so as to benefit from resource availability and optimal latency capabilities closer to the edge – features provided from emerging networking technologies and schemes like (B)5G and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) architectures. Compounding this issue, CONNECT considered the integration of ETSI MEC as a driving factor for bringing processing power near the vehicle to meet ultra-low-latency requirements, and to reduce network traffic towards a centralized data-centre. To achieve this CCAM-wide trust quantification, CONNECT has designed an overarching framework comprising of two phases, namely the Design and Runtime phase. The Setup phase encompasses all operations needed for the correct establishment and deployment of CONNECT- related components needed to support the continuous trust assessment throughout the entire lifecycle of a (data and/or entity) resource: From the definition of the appropriate trust model templates considering the most prominent types of risks and attacks against the entire CCAM ecosystem, dictating the type of trustworthiness evidence that need to be continuously monitored, from each resource, so as to quantify its trust level and compare it to the Required Trust Level (RTL), to the deployment of all trust-related information and components as part of CONNECT’S Trusted Computing Base towards enforcing the circulated trust policies. The Runtime phase encompasses the (runtime) operation of all CONNECT attestation schemes and security controls (i.e. Misbehaviour Detection service), protected through their instantiation in a Trusted Execution Environment, for allowing the secure monitoring and exchange (in a verifiable manner) of a resource’s trustworthiness evidence based on which the trust assessment/quantification will occur. Such trustworthiness evidence will be further processed, before been transmitted outside the vehicle, so as to be adequately abstracted (harmonized trustworthiness evidence) in order to avoid privacy implications.