SEOUL, August 19 (AJP) - A government-funded project has picked Kookmin University to build two of the main defenses for a new chip meant to keep hackers out of cars.
The project runs from July this year to December 2030, four years and six months, on a budget of 10 billion won ($7.07 million). Kookmin University gets 1.7 billion won of that.
The Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea are paying for the work. Ranix, a Seoul chip design company, leads the group. Kookmin University, Sungkyunkwan University, Ajou University, the Korea Automotive Technology Institute and Hyundai Mobis are doing the research together. Hyundai Motor is taking part as the buyer, not as a researcher.
Carmakers are shifting to what the industry calls the software-defined vehicle, a car whose features are controlled by software that can be updated after it is sold. That means more of what a car does runs through software and internal networks, and every one of those is a possible way in for an attacker. Two international rules, UNECE R155 and ISO/SAE 21434, now require carmakers to guard against this.
The group wants to put several defenses that are now scattered across different parts onto one chip. Among them are encryption designed to resist future quantum computers, a hardware vault for storing encryption keys, a chip fingerprint that cannot be copied, a generator of truly random numbers, and a system that watches for intruders.
Kookmin University is handling three pieces. It will build the intruder detection system and test it in a real car. It will work out how to run ML-KEM and ML-DSA, two quantum-resistant encryption methods approved by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, directly in hardware. And it will build tools to check whether a chip's random numbers are truly random, which decides whether an encryption key can be guessed.
The detection work takes a different path from the usual one. Most systems watch either what happens inside the chip or what moves across the car's internal network, and look at each on its own. Kookmin University plans to link the two, so a strange event in the processor and odd traffic on the network are read as one signal.
Jeon Sang-hoon, a professor in Kookmin University's Department of Automotive IT Convergence, is leading the work. Yeom Yong-jin and Kim Dong-chan, both professors in the Department of Information Security, Cryptography and Mathematics, are handling the random number checks and the quantum-resistant encryption, respectively.
"This project is national recognition of Kookmin University's convergence research capability spanning vehicle network security, chip-level security and cryptographic theory," Jeon said. "By 2030 we will secure a multi-layer intrusion detection system and post-quantum cryptography implementation and verification technology proven in real vehicle environments, and contribute to raising the national competitiveness of South Korea's future mobility security technology."
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