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Due to economic, environmental and political reasons, there is an increasing demand for zero-emission vehicles. With the wide-scale deployment of electric car systems, a variety of parties with conflicting interests will be interacting, and there will be incentives for dishonest behavior. Consequently, new technical challenges that are related to IT security and embedded security arise in the context of electric vehicle systems. For instance, payment and metering needs to be secured, privacy needs to be preserved, and the infrastructure needs to be protected. This work investigates for the first time the security threats that must be addressed in intelligent transportation systems, it discusses possible solutions, and it presents the benefits that IT security provides in this context.

This work shows how vehicular features which are pre-installed but deactivated can be securely enabled later with activation codes. Nowadays, feature activation results in two business models. The first model is a pay-per-use model which drastically reduces one-time acquisition costs for customers while increasing the long-term revenue of manufacturers. The second model is an “activate-once-and-use-always” model, which allows vehicles to come in differently configured variants even though most electronic devices use the same hardware and software components. Since the usage of product features is usually liable to pay costs (e.g., aftermarket business models) and legal obligations (e.g., export restrictions), the underlying security of the feature activation process is essential. This paper discusses the theoretical background of secure activation codes geared to an automotive context.