WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Autonomous cars and vehicles present a clear opportunity for cyber criminals to wreak chaos on our roads, but first they’d have to break the vehicles’ unbreakable quantum encryption.

If you, like many people, have ever wondered how we’ll be able to stop cyber criminals taking control of the fleets of autonomous vehicles and causing chaos in our streets and on our highways in years to come then one answer could be Hackproof Code, something that the US military trialled a couple of years ago with great success, and another, thanks to Singapore based SK Telecom, could be to use Quantum Encryption, which, like the US military’s experiment, is also thought to be unhackable. And they announced their “Quantum Security Gateway” solution a few weeks ago at the Mobile World Congress.

According to the company the solution is an “integrated security device that will be installed inside cars and protect various electronic units and networks in the vehicle,” and the gateway, which was co-developed with South Korean controller maker GINT, will be used to secure all the vehicles various systems, from Vehicle-2-Everything (V2X) and Bluetooth communication systems to the car’s driver assistance, radar and smart keys. The solution will also alert the driver and a central monitoring system to any peculiar activity.

The gateway works by transferring a quantum random number generator and Quantum Key along with the vehicle’s data that will “fundamentally prevent hacking and make the cars unhackable”, SK Telecom said.

SK Telecom formed its quantum technology research lab in 2011 and first applied the technology in a South Korean LTE network in in 2016, then in February 2018 the company also bought half the stake of Swiss based quantum key solution provider ID Quantique, saying at the time it “would offer heightened security for 5G.” And in July, it ran the first trial of the new “quantum-safe system” for Deutsche Telekom’s trial network.

Source: ZDNet