The International Transportation Innovation Center (ITIC) in Greenville, South Carolina, USA, has signed an MoU with SK Telecom to collaborate in the development of quantum cryptography technologies. As part of this, ITIC and SK Telecom will jointly develop and pursue standardization of hacking-prevention technologies to protect connected vehicles. The ITIC is also building a testbed to validate secure networked transportation technologies.
Developed in 2011, SK Telecom’s quantum crypotography system is claimed to be the most secure encryption method, using quantum physics instead of mathematics-based encryption algorithms commonly used today. That is, it securely distributes a secret key to legitimate parties. Here, a key is a table of random numbers shared by legitimate users in such a way that the information is known only to them, and secure means secures against any possible eavesdropping, which is the highest level of security. The system is expected to enhance security of critical network infrastructure.
Currently, most Internet of Things systems, including the connected vehicle ecosystems, use software-based pseudo-random number generators for encryption, meaning that they can fall vulnerable to hackers who decrypt the sequence of digits. Once developed for commercial use, SK Telecom’s technology will eliminate such concerns for security as it generates true random numbers based on hardware.
September 16, 2015
