A secure protocol for session keys establishment between ECUs in the CAN bus

Abstract

This paper presents a secure protocol for authenticating Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus and establishing session keys between them. These keys are used to introduce message source authentication for the CAN network. Our method is based on the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) which is more suitable for embedded systems where computational power and memory are very reduced. The performance evaluation of the proposed authentication method shows better results in comparison to the existing methods in term of bus load. The security of the proposed mechanism is validated using AVISPA tool which is very efficient for finding potential attacks automatically in cryptographic protocols.