BlackBerry’s QNX Black Channel Communications Technology will be used in Motional’s next-generation driverless vehicles. Launched in April 2020, Motional will be BlackBerry’s first customer to use QNX Black Channel Communications for driverless systems. The technology enables Motional to provide safe data communication exchanges within the vehicle’s safety systems.
“It’s a real privilege to contribute our technology to Motional, a leader in developing safe, self-driving vehicles,” said John Wall, SVP and Co-Head, BlackBerry Technology Solutions.
“QNX Black Channel Communications Technology supports Motional’s mission to deliver ‘safety-first’ systems in an era in which driverless transportation is evolving at a rapid pace.”
Certified to ISO 26262 ASIL D, the automotive industry’s functional safety standard, QNX Black Channel Communications Technology is based on the safe data communication requirements identified in IEC 61508 and mitigation measures defined in AUTOSAR End-to-End communications protection profiles.
Designed to the highest functional safety standards and certified by TÜV Rheinland to ISO 26262 ASIL D, QNX Black Channel Communications Technology helps ensure the safety of your system’s data communication by encapsulating the data being exchanged in a safety header and performing safety checks to validate it at both ends.
- Safety certified mechanism to send and receive data passed over unsafe communication links (UDP, TCP, CAN)
- Provides integrity checking, authentication and detection of data loss
- Supports Adaptive AUTOSAR profiles
- Uses minimal computing resources and has minimal impact on data transmission speeds
The product makes the countless nodes of data communication in embedded systems functionally safe. By safely encapsulating the data being exchanged and validating it with essential safety checks, it protects data communication from systematic software faults, random hardware faults and transient faults while helping in the automatic prevention of damage from these failures, all with minimal impact on system performance.
QNX Black Channel Communications Technology protects data communication regardless of underlying communication software and hardware. It can help you streamline development and accelerate timelines and reduce the cost in moving projects from research to production and onto roads. QNX Black Channel Communications Technology provides a ‘safety bag’ for data that detects the faults defined in IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 including:
| ● Incorrect message addressing | ● Data insertion |
| ● Data corruption | ● Data masquerade |
| ● Data repetition | ● Asymmetric data |
| ● Invalid message sequencing | ● Reception only by subset |
| ● Data loss |
Junsung Kim, Vice President of Infrastructure Software, Motional commented:
“The safety of our vehicles is always Motional’s first priority,”
“We look forward to leveraging BlackBerry QNX Black Channel Communications Technology in our next-generation vehicle development and continuing Motional’s exceptional safety legacy.”
QNX Black Channel Communications Technology Specification and Profile Support
| Specification | Profile | CRC/ HMAC |
|---|---|---|
| AUTOSAR SW-C E2E | 1 | CRC8 |
| 4 | CRC32 | |
| 6 | CRC16 | |
| 7 | CRC64 | |
| Custom | 17 | HMAC (SHA 256) |
| 17 | HMAC (SHA 512) |
QNX Black Channel Communications Technology can run on QNX OS (SDP 7.0 or QOS 2.1), Linux or SafeRTOS. However, with QNX OS for Safety (QOS 2.1), you can deploy out of the box with no configuration required.
