An Integrated Safe and Secure Approach for Authentication and Secret Key Establishment in Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems

In this paper, we propose an integrated safe and secure approach for operation in automotive cyber-physical systems (CPS). The proposed approach incorporates a novel protocol for authentication and secret key establishment for electronic control units (ECUs) in automotive CPS. The approach leverages certificates and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for authentication and secret key establishment, and symmetric encryption and hash-based message authentication codes for providing confidentiality and integrity, respectively, for messages on in-vehicle bus. To incorporate safety primitives, the approach leverages multicore ECUs and provide fault tolerance by redundant multi-threading (FT-RMT), FT-RMT enhanced by quick error detection (FT-RMT-QED), and FT-RMT with lightweight check-pointing (CP). The proposed approach ensures that the simultaneous integration of security and safety primitives in intra-vehicle ECU communication does not violate real-time constraints of automotive CPS applications. We demonstrate the proposed approach through a steer-by-wire case study. Results verify that our proposed approach integrates confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and secret key establishment in intra-vehicle networks without violating real-time constraints even in the presence of errors in computation and transmission.