Seven projects whose participants include Honda, Thales and WMG have won funding to develop cyber security solutions for connected and autonomous vehicles.

The £1.2m award has been made by Zenzic, an organisation dedicated to making the UK a world leader in connected and autonomous mobility.

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According to Zenzic, the Cyber Securities Feasibility studies competition is part-funded by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) and delivered in partnership with Innovate UK.

In a statement, Richard Porter, Zenzic’s technology and innovation director 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.”

Zenzic’s UK Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap to 2030 highlights cyber resilience as the most significant technical challenge to be solved before the UK can benefit from self-driving vehicles on roads, which will need to communicate with other vehicles, infrastructure and third-party services.

The cyber security competition winners will focus on finding ways to measure and maintain cyber-physical resilience and identify vulnerabilities, provide specifications to support the creation of new cyber test facilities for connected and self-driving vehicles, and explore commercial opportunities to develop new cyber-related services.

“The connected and self-driving vehicle sector is set to be worth £62bn by 2030, with safer roads and smoother, more accessible journeys for all,” said future of transport minister, George Freeman. “Whether we’re turning cars into Wi-Fi connected hotspots or equipping them with millions of lines of code, we must consider the new challenges ​of putting this technology into practice. Today’s £1.2m funding boost will help to guarantee the future safety and security of self-driving vehicles, both in the UK and globally.”