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With the increasing amount of interconnections between vehicles, the attack surface of internal vehicle networks is rising steeply. Although these networks are shielded against external attacks, they often do not have any internal security to protect against malicious components or adversaries who can breach the network perimeter. To secure the in-vehicle network, all communicating components must be authenticated, and only authorized components should be allowed to send and receive messages. This is achieved through the use of an authentication framework. Cryptography is widely used to authenticate communicating parties and provide secure communication channels (e.g., Internet communication). However, the real-time performance requirements of in-vehicle networks restrict the types of cryptographic algorithms and protocols that may be used. In particular, asymmetric cryptography is computationally infeasible during vehicle operation.In this work, we address the challenges of designing authentication protocols for automotive systems. We present Lightweight Authentication for Secure Automotive Networks (LASAN), a full lifecycle authentication approach. We describe the core LASAN protocols and show how they protect the internal vehicle network while complying with the real-time constraints and low computational resources of this domain. By leveraging the fixed structure of automotive networks, we minimize bandwidth and computation requirements. Unlike previous work, we also explain how this framework can be integrated into all aspects of the automotive product lifecycle, including manufacturing, vehicle maintenance, and software updates. We evaluate LASAN in two different ways: First, we analyze the security properties of the protocols using established protocol verification techniques based on formal methods. Second, we evaluate the timing requirements of LASAN and compare these to other frameworks using a new highly modular discrete event simulator for in-vehicle networks, which we have developed for this evaluation.

Security in automotive in-vehicle networks is an increasing problem with the growing connectedness of road vehicles. This article proposes a security-aware priority assignment for automotive controller area network (CAN) platforms with the aim of mitigating scaling effects of attacks on vehicle fleets. CAN is the dominating field bus in the automotive domain due to its simplicity, low cost, and robustness. While messages might be encrypted to enhance the security of CAN systems, their priorities are usually identical for automotive platforms, comprising generally a large number of vehicle models. As a result, the identifier uniquely defines which message is sent, allowing attacks to scale across a fleet of vehicles with the same platform. As a remedy, we propose a methodology that is capable of determining obfuscated message identifiers for each individual vehicle. Since identifiers directly represent message priorities, the approach has to take the resulting response time variations into account while satisfying application deadlines for each vehicle schedule separately. Our approach relies on Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Program (QCQP) solving in two stages, specifying first a set of feasible fixed priorities and subsequently bounded priorities for each message. With the obtained bounds, obfuscated identifiers are determined, using a very fast randomized sampling. The experimental results, consisting of a large set of synthetic test cases and a realistic case study, give evidence of the efficiency of the proposed approach in terms of scalability. The results also show that the diversity of obtained identifiers is effectively optimized with our approach, resulting in a very good obfuscation of CAN messages in in-vehicle communication.