Supporting security protocols on CAN-based networks

The ever-increasing variety of services built on top of the Controller Area Network (CAN), along with the recent discovery of vulnerabilities in CAN-based automotive systems (some of them demonstrated in practice), stimulated a renewed attention to security-oriented enhancements of the CAN protocol. The issue is further compounded nowadays because, unlike in the past, security can no longer be enforced by physical bus segregation. This paper describes how CAN XR, a recently proposed extension of the CAN data-link layer, can effectively support the distributed calculation of arbitrary binary Boolean functions, which are the foundation of most security protocols, without necessarily disclosing their operands on the bus. The feasibility of the approach is then shown through experimental evaluation and by confirming its applicability to a shared key generation protocol proposed in literature.