SELFY project: Empowering cyber-resilient and privacy-preserving CCAM systems

It is a pleasure to inaugurate the new “Project in the Spotlight” section of the CCAM website by presenting SELFY, a recently concluded European project from the CCAM Partnership’s portfolio, that has achieved significant milestones in advancing cybersecurity and resilience for connected and autonomous vehicles.

Successfully finalized in May 2025, the SELFY project represents a major step forward in securing connected and autonomous mobility in smart cities. Coordinated by Eurecat Technology Centre, the project developed and validated a complete cybersecurity solution that enables vehicles and infrastructures to autonomously detect, respond to, and recover from cyber-attacks in real time, while fully preserving system privacy and integrity. The SELFY consortium, composed of companies, technology centres, universities, and public administrations from eight European countries, worked intensively for three years to deliver an end-to-end approach designed to address the growing cybersecurity challenges in CCAM.

The solution developed was rigorously tested in real-world conditions in two pilot demonstrations. In Catalonia, Spain, the first trial took place at Applus+ IDIADA’s ADAS/CAV Urban Area Tracks, which faithfully replicates urban traffic conditions with intersections, roundabouts, pedestrian crossings, and multilane roads. The system faced a variety of complex cybersecurity scenarios, including the detection of vulnerable road users while a hacked vehicle was transmitting misleading information, the identification of sensor failures through infrastructure data fusion, the filtering of unreliable cooperative messages, and the safe abortion of an overtaking manoeuvre during an active cyber-attack. SELFY’s real-time anonymisation algorithm was also successfully validated, effectively protecting sensitive information such as pedestrian faces and vehicle licence plates during live data processing.

The SELFY tools demonstrated exceptional performance, identifying over 95% of vulnerable vehicles and detecting more than 90% of security breaches with high precision. These results confirmed the effectiveness of the solution in detecting vulnerabilities and mitigating cybersecurity risks in complex, dynamic environments.

In parallel, a second demonstration was carried out under live urban traffic conditions in Vienna, Austria, where the SELFY system was deployed across the city with roadside units and camera sensors. The system continuously monitored the consistency between video images and Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) and successfully detected artificially induced mismatches and tampered sensors in real time. This urban validation confirmed that SELFY’s tools, initially tested in controlled environments, are equally robust and effective in open traffic, proving their readiness for broader European adoption.

“The SELFY project has provided an innovative solution that strengthens the reliability of autonomous and connected mobility systems,” explains Juan Caubet, Director of Eurecat’s IT&OT Security Unit. “It ensures that vehicles and infrastructure can work together to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats without compromising user privacy.”

Fanny Breuil, Project Coordinator and European Programme Manager at Eurecat said: “We are proud to offer a practical, end-to-end solution that equips the entire mobility ecosystem with tools to safeguard the future of connected mobility. SELFY makes it possible to identify vulnerable vehicles, reduce the risk of security breaches, and enable the vehicles themselves to protect and self-recover, ensuring trust and secure data exchange.”

The SELFY project developed three integrated macro-solutions that together offer a robust cybersecurity framework for CCAM environments.

The situational awareness and collaborative perception system combines vehicle and infrastructure data to create a unified, reliable view of the driving environment. It continuously verifies the consistency of sensor readings and cooperative messages to detect discrepancies and assess the trustworthiness of each information source before making driving decisions.
The cooperative resilience and healing system, coordinated through a Vehicle Security Operations Centre (VSOC), strengthens the overall cybersecurity posture by detecting security incidents and offering secure degraded modes that allow vehicles to continue operating safely even during ongoing attacks.
The trust data management system ensures privacy and data protection through the detection of malicious behaviour in vehicles and roadside units, real-time anonymisation using AI-based techniques, and software update mechanisms protected by post-quantum cryptography to guarantee data integrity and traceability across system versions.

SELFY results provide “automotive manufacturers, traffic managers, fleet operators and drivers a comprehensive solution to detect, respond to and mitigate cyberattacks” added SELFY’s technical coordinator, Víctor Jiménez, researcher in the IT&OT Security Unit at Eurecat.

SELFY’s achievements provide a critical foundation for the secure and scalable deployment of CCAM in Europe. The project has successfully demonstrated that it is possible to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, reduce exposure to attacks, and enable vehicles and infrastructures to autonomously protect themselves and recover from cyber incidents, all while fully preserving user privacy. SELFY’s results pave the way for a more secure, resilient, and trustworthy smart mobility ecosystem across European cities.

Here you can find the final video of the project.

SELFY project was invited to present its outcomes at RTR conference 2025. Have a look at their presentation!

And below come key publications: