Probing Attacks on Physical Layer Key Agreement for Automotive Controller Area Networks (Extended Version)
This addresses security vulnerabilities in automotive networks, which is critical for vehicle safety, but is incremental as it builds on existing key agreement methods.
The paper demonstrates that probing attacks on the physical layer key agreement protocol for automotive CAN networks can lead to nearly-complete leakage of secret key bits, and proposes techniques to minimize this information leakage.
Efficient key management for automotive networks (CAN) is a critical element, governing the adoption of security in the next generation of vehicles. A recent promising approach for dynamic key agreement between groups of nodes, Plug-and-Secure for CAN, has been demonstrated to be information theoretically secure based on the physical properties of the CAN bus. In this paper, we illustrate side-channel attacks, leading to nearly-complete leakage of the secret key bits, by an adversary that is capable of probing the CAN bus. We identify the fundamental characteristics that lead to such attacks and propose techniques to minimize the information leakage at the hardware, controller and system levels.