The winners of a competition focused on cyber security in self-driving vehicles have been awarded a total of £1.2m in funding to help advance connected and autonomous vehicle developments.

Zenzic’s report highlighted cyber resilience as the most significant technical challenge to be solved before self-driving vehicles can be fully deployed

The Cyber Securities Feasibility studies competition is part-funded by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) and delivered by government and industry partnership Zenzic (formerly Meridian) in partnership with Innovate UK.

The competition winners will help define requirements for, and support the development of a connected and automated mobility (CAM) cyber security testing capabilities; Zenzic’s September 2019 ‘UK Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap to 2030’ report highlighted cyber resilience as the most significant technical challenge to be solved before the UK can benefit from self-driving vehicles on roads and the services they will underpin.

Seven projects have been awarded funding and will focus on three key areas, including finding ways to measure and maintain cyber-physical resilience and identify vulnerabilities, providing specifications to support the creation of new cyber test facilities for connected and self-driving vehicles, and exploring commercial opportunities to develop new cyber-related services that can be deployed in the UK and across the global CAM marketplace.

Richard Porter, technology and innovation director at Zenzic said: “With the advent of self-driving vehicles, the complexity of cyber defences will increase as thousands of vehicles, pieces of road-side infrastructure and connecting systems need to share data securely. This is an opportunity for the UK to build on the decades of experience we already have and once again set the standards for the rest of the world to follow.”