PONTIAC, Mich. — Though trucking has historically lagged behind other industries on the digitization front, the freight transportation sector has been moving quickly to erase that deficit in recent years. While these rapid advances in technology adoption have unlocked greater efficiency, they also have made the industry vulnerable to cyberattacks. This growing need for cyber defenses in trucking has attracted the attention of Netherlands-based cybersecurity firm Irdeto. While most of the company’s 50-year history has focused on security in industries such as video entertainment, Irdeto has recently moved aggressively into transportation, with U.S. headquarters in Pontiac, Mich., just north of Detroit. With the annual Woodward Dream Cruise automotive event happening on the street below, Irdeto took the occasion to offer its local office as a venue for an Aug. 15 fireside chat on technology issues in trucking. The panel discussion included Mark Bara, president of performance solutions at trucking technology supplier Clarience Technologies; and Nelson Allsbury, a business development manager with technology deployment and monitoring firm Velociti.

Bara said the connectivity of vehicles on the road presents an entirely new reality for the industry, which no longer views the tractor as the technology center and the trailer as merely a “box on wheels.”

“We’ve had electronic controls on heavy-duty and medium-duty engines since the mid-’80s, so electronics in this industry is nothing new,” Bara said. “But where we’re going now is different. They’ve always known what was going on with the engines and the powertrains. What they didn’t know was what was going on with the trailer behind them.” Clarience offers Road Ready, a connected trailer system that checks critical data on the trailer before the driver hits the road, including details such as light-out detection that offers analytics on what went wrong, to speed the process of addressing the issue.

The panelists said one major trend is the replacement of physical items like vehicle keys with digital technology. And as technologies like these become more commonplace, the trucking industry also looks to information technology service firms to help them monitor what they have implemented. Allsbury said Velociti monitors and maintains 700,000 pieces of technology for various customers in the transportation industry. “We’ll get to a site that might have hundreds of thousands of trucks at a time,” Allsbury said. “Half our day is trying to find keys. So we’re actively working with our largest customers to deal with that every day.” Allsbury said Velociti came into contact with Irdeto because of the latter’s Keystone technology, which provides keyless vehicle access through secure, permission-based digital keys.

And as more hardware shifts to software, the nature of vehicle maintenance is changing in the same way. Bara said trucking maintenance shops have had to adapt to keep up with that dynamic. “When I was young, technicians turned wrenches,” Bara said. “Now they don’t [just] turn wrenches. It’s all on computer, so you’ve got to be deeply into computers and deeply into analytics.” Diagnostic systems have become essential for fleet maintenance, but they are also a target for hackers, who could potentially compromise brakes, sensors and other components if they can gain access. Irdeto CEO Doug Lowther said the company developed products such as Keystone to protect both assets and enterprises from such attacks. “If you’re operating a big fleet of trucks, you may have once had a board with all the keys,” Lowther said. “Now that can all be done electronically so you can download the key, store it on your mobile phone and get rid of that whole physical problem of how you get the one and only key for that truck to the driver or the maintenance tech.” But such technologies also expand what’s known as the attack surface — all the different targets a hacker can try to exploit to gain access to the truck. Lowther said Irdeto developed Keystone to offer the industry a type of digital key that can’t be easily cloned because it is cryptographically secured against attacks. The digital key also integrates into an Irdeto app to make the experience of using it simpler for drivers.

According to Lowther, Irdeto decided to set up shop in the Detroit area because the company recognized that automotive and trucking were a critical audience for its technology — and also for IT talent. That’s at a premium in an industry that can sometimes respond slowly to technological advances. Bara said he sees that reality in back-office operations as well, especially with smaller businesses. “When you talk to the mega fleets, they have the infrastructure,” Bara said. “They can bring in an IT team and they can do a lot. The smaller fleets don’t have the back-office support, so they don’t have the technology. They may have done one level of connected technology, but they can’t get all the benefits they want because they don’t have all the features.”