Secure Communication on CAN-Bus Using Sporadic Authenticated Encryption

With the advancement of autonomous driving systems, intra- and inter-vehicle communication has significantly increased. Many of these systems perform critical functions related to the In-Vehicle Network (IVN), making them attractive targets for attackers. Ensuring vehicle safety is thus a major concern for researchers in this field. Preventing cyberattacks on IVNs, a matter that could compromise sensitive vehicle systems and threaten passengers’ safety, is a pressing issue. However, many existing security methods for IVNs come at very high network costs, which is in contrast to the resource limitation of such systems. In this article, we propose a low-cost method to secure vehicles against replay, sniffing, and spoofing attacks, ensuring vehicle safety from the control stability perspective. Our approach minimizes the need for message authentication, reducing communication costs. Unlike many other methods, we prioritize system stability, to ensure that reducing the authentications does not lead to instability or jeopardize the system’s safety. To achieve this, our method continuously checks and satisfies the Lyapunov’s stability of the underlying control system.