LEAP: A Lightweight Encryption and Authentication Protocol for In-Vehicle Communications
This addresses a critical security problem for automotive systems by providing an efficient solution to protect in-vehicle communications from remote attacks.
The paper tackles the security vulnerability of the Controller Area Network (CAN) in vehicles by proposing LEAP, a lightweight encryption and authentication protocol that is 8X faster and requires less memory than existing MAC-based approaches while thwarting recent attacks.
The Controller Area Network (CAN) is considered as the de-facto standard for the in-vehicle communications due to its real-time performance and high reliability. Unfortunately, the lack of security protection on the CAN bus gives attackers the opportunity to remotely compromise a vehicle. In this paper, we propose a Lightweight Encryption and Authentication Protocol (LEAP) with low cost and high efficiency to address the security issue of the CAN bus. LEAP exploits the security-enhanced stream cipher primitive to provide encryption and authentication for the CAN messages. Compared with the state-of-the-art Message Authentication Code (MAC) based approaches, LEAP requires less memory, is 8X faster, and thwarts the most recently proposed attacks.