Future safety applications based on car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication have been identified as a measure for decreasing the number of fatal traffic accidents. Examples for such applications are local danger warnings, traffic light pre-emption, or electronic emergency brakes. While these functionalities inspire a new era of safety in transportation, new security requirements need to be considered in order to prevent attacks on these systems. Intrusion threats can be manifold: illegally forced malfunctioning of safety critical in-vehicular components as well as the illegal influence of traffic provoked by means of fake messages are just two likely possibilities. It is the distinct objective of EVITA to address these threats by preventing unauthorised manipulation of on-board systems in order to successfully prevent the intrusion into the in-vehicular systems and the transmission of corrupted data to the outside. By focusing on vehicle intrusion protection, EVITA complements the projects SeVeCOM and NoW, which focus on communication protection.Starting from identifying the necessary industrial use cases regarding assembly and field maintenance and compiling profound scenarios of possible threats, the overall security requirements are defined. On this basis a secure trust model will be compiled and a secure on-board architecture and protocol will be specified, verified, validated and, lastly, demonstrated. EVITA will release the architecture and protocol specification as open specifications.The consortium brings together all relevant expertise to successfully take the challenge: a car manufacturer, tier-one suppliers, security, hardware, software and legal experts. In order to guarantee a broad uptake of the open specification, EVITA will cooperate with the Car 2 Car Communication Consortium. EVITA will provide a base for the secure deployment of electronic safety aids based on car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication.