BlackBerry Limited has announced a new security credential management system (SCMS) service aimed at accelerating the development of smart cities and intelligent transportation systems.
The SCMS service provides the mechanism for vehicles and infrastructure, such as traffic lights, to exchange information in a trustworthy and private manner using digital certificates.
BlackBerry is making the service available with no service fees to automakers and public offices involved in smart city and connected vehicle pilots.
According to the US Department of Transportation, as connected vehicle applications exchange information among vehicles, roadway infrastructure, traffic management centers, and wireless mobile devices, a security system is needed to ensure that users can trust the validity of information received from other systems.
The SCMS service is based on BlackBerry’s Certicom technology and offers a secure hosted public key infrastructure (PKI) which can manage certificates on behalf of an organization or an entire ecosystem.
The service is designed to scale to support national and transnational deployments, allowing OEMs and public officials to take advantage of a turnkey cloud-based service for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) certificate issuance and lifecycle management. BlackBerry can also support hybrid SCMS solutions optimized for high- volume vehicle production.
“The future of autonomous vehicles cannot be realized until intelligent transportation systems are put in place,” said John Chen, Executive Chairman and CEO, BlackBerry. “By removing barriers such as security, privacy, and cost, we believe our SCMS service will help accelerate the many smart city and connected vehicle pilot programs taking place around the world.”
BlackBerry’s new service has been interoperability tested in multiple OmniAir Consortium PlugFests held earlier this year. The company’s first project using the new SCMS service will be in partnership with Invest Ottawa, who will leverage it within a secure 16-kilometer road autonomous vehicle (AV) test track that resembles a miniature city, complete with pavement markings, traffic lights, stop signs, and pedestrian crosswalks.
First published in eGov Innovation