“The future of the automobile is all about embedded intelligence,” BlackBerry chief executive John Chen said in the Oct. 31 announcement. “I believe our expertise in secure embedded software makes us the preferred technology provider to put the smart in the car.” Security is critical to develop hack-resistant autonomous vehicles, Bloor said. “We are bringing a lot of the security assets that secure the BlackBerry phones into the automotive space,” he said. Self-driving cars that are commanded by their occupants or dispatched through a linked network need to have a very high standard of security.
“Moving forward towards this vision of the autonomous connected vehicle, you can’t really build a safe system if you can’t make it secure,” Bloor said. “Obviously, safety and security are very strongly intertwined.”