New CARS lab

Intel and leading European universities in the field of cybersecurity and privacy will open a new initiative for “Collaborative Autonomous & Resilient Systems” (CARS) to tackle security, privacy, and functional safety challenges of autonomous systems that may collaborate with each other – examples are drones, self-driving vehicles, or industrial automation systems.

The goal of the CARS lab is to kick off longer-term collaboration between leading research organizations to enhance resilience and trustworthiness of these cutting-edge technologies. Collaborating institutions include TU Darmstadt (Germany), Aalto University (Finland), Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany), TU Wien (Austria), and Luxembourg University (Luxembourg). The coordinator of the new CARS lab will be TU Darmstadt serving as the hub university, where several researchers of Intel Labs are located. The research teams will collaborate with Intel teams on campus to design, prototype, and publish novel and innovative resilient and secure autonomous collaborative systems and to build an ecosystem to further validate their ideas in real-world scenarios.

The CARS lab is a new Intel Collaborative Lab as a continuation of the extremely successful Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (ICRI-SC) that included TU Darmstadt and Aalto University and focused on mobile and IoT security between 2012 and 2017. Noteworthy achievements resulting from this collaboration include Off-the-Hook, a client-side anti-phishing technique and SafeKeeper which uses Intel Software Guard Extensions to protect user passwords in web services; as well as TrustLite, a lightweight security architecture for IoT devices.

In the renewed collaboration Intel and the – now five – partner universities focus on the study of security, privacy and functional safety of autonomous systems that collaborate with each other.

TU Darmstadt aims to build on the foundation of the promising results from the initial work in the Intel institute and will address more complex systems with advanced real-life collaboration and attack models and defenses.

“We have already had five years of very successful and fruitful experience with the collaborative research lab between TU Darmstadt and Intel. Since 2012 our researchers could closely work with an Intel team located at TU Darmstadt leading to highly impactful results in the area of embedded and IoT security. I am confident that the new and much larger CARS lab that integrates top researchers from five European universities is an excellent foundation for a creative, dynamic and highly innovative environment, and will strongly contribute to the new theme of security and safety for autonomous and intelligent systems”, adds Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from TU Darmstadt.