Development of an AUTOSAR Compliant Cryptographic Library on State-of-the-Art Automotive Grade Controllers

Abstract

In the light of the recently reported attacks on intra-vehicle networks, it has become clear that cryptography is vital for assuring the security of in-vehicle communications. The current preoccupation of industry professionals in this direction is proved by the inclusion of a comprehensive cryptographic extension in the recent-most version of the AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) stan-dard. In this work we try to give an answer on how prepared are current state-of-the-art automotive controllers for implementing cryptographic primitives and what is the exact cost of software implementations. We take into account automotive grade controllers that range from some of the most constrained platforms, e.g., from 8051 based tire sensors with 8-bit cores, up to 32-bit Infineon TriCore architectures, as well as devices that lay in between these two. We provide experimental results on several symmetric cryptographic primitives, i.e., block ciphers and hash functions, mainly focusing on the lightest constructions proposed in the literature, e.g., Speck, Katan, Blake, as well as on past or current standards, e.g., AES, SHA2 or SHA3. As expected, the results are sparse, some of the platforms being well prepared, capable to easily handle software implementation or carrying dedicated hardware, while for others no dedicated hardware exists while software implementation of current cryptographic standards cannot be handled, especially with the overhead incurred by the cohesion to the AUTOSAR standard.