An Information Security Protocol for Automotive Ethernet

An Information Security Protocol for Automotive Ethernet

Automotive Ethernet is considered the backbone network of future vehicles owing to its high bandwidth, high throughput, and low cost. With the appearance of the connected car environment, in-vehicle networks (e.g., automotive Ethernet) are now connected to external networks (e.g., 3G/4G/5G mobile networks), enabling an attacker to perform an attack using automotive Ethernet vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, security problems have not been treated appropriately in automotive Ethernet. In this paper, we propose a security protocol for automotive Ethernet. The protocol has two secure modules: Key Distribution (KD) and Secure Communication (SC). During start-up phase, KD distributes keys to all legitimate ECUs. During the communication phase, SC provides the following important baseline security primitives: data confidentiality and data authenticity. We evaluate the effectiveness and real-time performance of the proposed security protocol using CANoe software and a MPC5646C microcontroller. Results show that the proposed security protocol can improve the defense ability of automotive Ethernet on the premise of meeting the real-time requirements.