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The need for vehicular data security and privacy protection is already enormous and increases even further. Prominent application areas are for instance theft protection, anti-counterfeiting, secure data storage and secure communication inside the vehicle and from the vehicle to the outside world. However, most of the vehicular security and privacy protection solutions involve modern cryptography and require availability of cryptographic keys in the vehicle and in related backend infrastructure. A central aspect for ensuring this availability and a controlled usage of such cryptographic keys is a secure key management, which affects the whole lifecycle of the key, from creation and distribution, usage, backup and update up to key deactivation.

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.

For new automotive applications and services, information technology (IT) has gained central importance. IT-related costs in car manufacturing are already high, and they will increase dramatically in the future. Yet whereas the area of safety and reliability has become a relatively well-established field, the protection of vehicular IT systems against systematic manipulation or intrusion has only recently started to emerge. Nevertheless, IT security is already the base of some vehicular applications, such as immobilizers or digital tachographs. To securely enable future automotive applications and business models, IT security will be one of the central technologies for the next generation of vehicles. After a state-of-the-art overview of IT security in vehicles, this paper will give a short introduction into cryptographic terminology and functionality.