Centralized architecture for ECU security management in connected and autonomous vehicles

The strong development of automotive industry is changing traditional perceptions towards a vision of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), such as each vehicle consists of a number of networked computer components, called Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in order to achieve numerous automotive services. Controller Area Network (CAN) is primarily designed for automotive networking with little regard to security. Indeed, the lack of authentication and confidentiality features could lead to automotive cyberattacks putting at risk the safety of the driver, the pedestrians and other vehicles. Therefore, identity management, authentication and data confidentiality must be handled efficiently. In this paper, we propose a centralized architecture for ECU security management in CAVs. First, we present a lightweight symmetric cryptography based session key agreement scheme between each ECU and the manufacturer data center, which uses a random nonce, concatenation operator, a simple hash function and a keyed-hash message authentication code (HMAC). Then, we define the configuration and security parameters on the CAN bus. Finally, we discuss our proposal. To the best of our knowledge, no prior works have been proposed for the establishment of a session key between each ECU and the data center.