Vehicles with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) use map data for safety and comfort features. In self-driving cars, this goes even further. HD maps help vehicles to understand what their sensors see in order to position the car with high accuracy and to enable the planning of vehicle control maneuvers beyond sensor visibility.
ADAS and self-driving vehicle functionalities are rated as safety critical. Therefore, the source and integrity of the data needs to be guaranteed and secured when map data is updated. The goal of the NDS Signature FTX is to ensure the authenticity of the data and thereby prevent the manipulation of driver assistance systems by supplying them with false data.
NDS Signature FTX provides data structures to model signatures that are used to authenticate map data. Signatures give map suppliers and car manufacturers more flexibility as to what type of cryptographic method they can use. To ensure that the NDS map data is not modified while being transferred from a backend to the application, signatures are stored in NDS tiles and columns in a separate table.
NDS Signature FTX enables the authentication of map data updates, which is important for safety relevant map-based features.
To support end-to-end protection, a map data provider can have its NDS compiler generate such signatures for specific table columns and include the signatures in a map update.
FTX is short for “Fast Track Extension”, an established mechanism of the NDS Association to bring new functionalities to market on the fast track, i.e. before going through our fully validated NDS standardization process. An FTX allows NDS members to start the development of topics which will later be added to the NDS specification standard.
NDS Association members can find the documentation for the new Signature FTX online here: https://doc.nds-association.org/version_signature/1.0
If you are not a NDS Association member and interested in an evaluation or in joining us, please get in touch.
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