Evan Allen (Virginia Tech), Zeb Bowden (Virginia Tech Transportation Institute), Randy Marchany (Virginia Tech), J. Scot Ransbottom (Virginia Tech)
Modern vehicles are increasingly connected systems that expose a wide variety of security risks to their users. Message authentication prevents entire classes of these attacks, such as message spoofing and electronic control unit impersonation, but current in-vehicle networks do not include message authentication features. Latency and throughput requirements for vehicle traffic can be very stringent (100 Mbps in cases), making it difficult to implement message authentication with cryptography due to the overheads required. This work investigates the feasibility of implementing cryptography-based message authentication in Automotive Ethernet networks that is fast enough to comply with these performance requirements. We find that it is infeasible to include Message Authentication Codes in all traffic without costly hardware accelerators and propose an alternate approach for future research to minimize the cost of authenticated traffic.