TU Graz participating in new IoT lead project

The starting shot for the new Austria-wide lead project Trustworthy IoT for CPS was fired on 1st December, 2017. It will develop methods, guidelines and tools to design today’s ubiquitous complex and networked cyber-physical systems in a secure and trustworthy way. In the project, 17 partners from Austrian industry and the research community will work together with the aim of utilising the potential of cyber-physical system applications to the full.

On 1st February the project consortium opened its doors to an interactive kick-off workshop open to the public at TU Wien. Interested companies in industry and research institutes were cordially invited to contribute to the discussion. You can find all the relevant information on the project website: <link http: www.iot4cps.at _blank int-link-external external link in new>www.iot4cps.at

Focus on networked vehicles and production

Networked systems, as used in autonomous vehicles or networked production, are opening up new possibilities of raising product quality and reducing development and operating costs as well as introducing new products and business models. For this reason a timely and intensive debate in this range of topics is of enormous importance for international competitiveness of the Austrian automotive supply industry. At the same time, increasing networking in cyber-physical systems places special demands on robustness, security and reliability. Just a small fault, for instance, a failure or tampering with a sensor, can lead to serious consequences in such systems – for instance, to an obstacle no longer being recognised. This is why special, highly integrated security concepts are necessary. At the same time, the topic of security must also be examined and addressed in all the stages of product development, in other words from design, through production, to regular operation; – in fact at all levels of system integration (from semiconductor chip to control components to the finished vehicle and the surrounding infrastructure). This is why the IoT4CPS project combines Austrian competence in the field of autonomous driving and research into security for cyber-physical systems. Two institutes of TU Graz will also be contributing their extensive expert knowledge to the project.

Institute of Technical Informatics

In IoT systems, such as networked autonomous vehicles, many control units from a variety of different manufacturers have to work together. But the overall system is only as secure as its weakest link. Thus, reliable development and configuration of each single control device with individual security keys at production and later maintenance would turn into a highly complex undertaking. On the one hand, this has to be carried out consistently throughout the whole supplier network and, on the other hand, get by without any central management authority. The <link https: www.tugraz.at en institutes iti home _blank int-link-external external link in new>Institute of Technical Informatics will therefore conduct research on system architecture, development methods and technical tools for the individual, trustworthy configuration of IoT devices.

Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications

The <link https: www.iaik.tugraz.at _blank int-link-external external link in new>Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications will deal primarily with the topic of protection against unauthorised access. Specifically, the hardware of IoT devices will be addressed using countermeasures for so-called side-channel attacks. In doing so, attackers make use of information like power consumption or time response to gain information about and access to a computer system indirectly. Furthermore, cryptographic methods will be analysed, improved and developed anew for IoT systems at the Institute in the course of the project.

This research project is attributed to the <link https: www.tugraz.at forschung forschungsschwerpunkte-5-fields-of-expertise information-communication-computing ueberblick-information-communication-computing _blank int-link-external external link in new>Field of Expertise Information, Communication & Computing, one of TU Graz' five strategic areas of research.