IDH-CAN: A Hardware-Based ID Hopping CAN Mechanism With Enhanced Security for Automotive Real-Time Applications

Abstract

Cybersecurity is increasingly important for the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles. The controller area network (CAN) is the most widely used in-vehicle network for automotive safety-critical applications. Enhancing the cybersecurity ability of CAN while considering the real-time, schedulability, and cost constraints becomes an urgent issue. To address this problem, a real-time, and schedulability analysis-guaranteed security mechanism [identification hopping CAN (IDH-CAN)] is proposed in this paper, which aims to improve the security performance of CAN under the constraints of automotive real-time applications. In order to support the operation of the IDH-CAN mechanism, an IDH-CAN controller is also designed and implemented on a field-programmable gate array, which can work as a hardware firewall in the data link layer of CAN to isolate cyberattacks from the physical layer. Meanwhile, to maximize the information entropy of the CAN message ID on the physical layer, the ID hopping table generation and optimization algorithms for IDH-CAN are also proposed. Then, information security evaluation experiments based on information entropy comparison are deployed. The simulation and practical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism in defending reverse engineering, targeted denial of service, and replay attacks without violating real-time and schedulability constraints.

Keywords

• Controller area network (CAN)
• cybersecurity
• ID hopping
• information entropy
• in-vehicle network
• real-time