Continental is reaffirming its pioneering role in digital mobility with the release of a white paper titled "Mobility Applications for Software-Defined Vehicles – An Approach Based on Verifiable Credentials."
The paper explores how vehicles, beyond serving traditional transport functions, could evolve into adaptive platforms for intelligent software solutions – including real-time traffic management.
The publication centres on verifiable credentials (VCs) – a key technology enabling greater security and data protection in connected mobility. Continental proposes a practical approach demonstrating how VCs can facilitate secure and trustworthy communication between vehicles, infrastructure, and digital services – a critical foundation for future, software-defined mobility.
Verifiable credentials are a standardised, cryptographically secure format for digitally representing information – such as vehicle or user details – allowing for unique and trustworthy identification. This white paper was developed as part of the GAIA-X 4 AGEDA publicly funded collaboration, a subproject of GAIA-X 4 Future Mobility. Continental is leading the initiative alongside prominent partners from industry and academia, tackling the key challenges of connectivity and digitalisation in the automotive sector.
Verifiable Credentials: The Key to Secure Mobility of Tomorrow
Mobility applications are fast becoming an essential component in meeting the transport needs of the future. Yet their integration into vehicles – along with the need to connect to open ecosystems and manage identities and data in a decentralised manner – poses numerous challenges. It is therefore imperative to establish a framework that allows seamless application integration while upholding stringent security and data protection standards.
"Research by our colleagues has demonstrated that verifiable credentials offer a promising route to the secure use of mobility services within vehicles. They provide a high level of security and data protection, making software-defined vehicles viable platforms for executing mobility services," explains Nino Romano, Chief Technology Officer at Continental Automotive.
Drawing on insights from the GAIA-X 4 AGEDA project, the white paper lays out the essential foundations and highlights how the adoption of verifiable credentials can offer secure and flexible access to vehicle data and functions. The document reinforces the significance of the framework for the future of mobility and affirms that the concepts developed are fundamental to the architecture of modern software-defined vehicles.
"Software-defined vehicles, as part of a cloud-based ecosystem, are the cornerstone of tomorrow's mobility solutions," says Romano. "With a reliable and trustworthy digital framework, we can turn this vision into reality."