TrustNet: Ensuring Normal-world and Trusted-world CAN-bus Networking

Abstract

As the cybersecurity risks in automotives grow due to vehicles increasing connectivity, enhancing the cybersecurity cognition of automotive networks has become an urgent requirement in industry. While modern microcontrollers offer ARM’s based Trustzone feature to secure critical applications, secure intra-vehicular protocols are required to design next generation vehicles. With standard security solutions not being practical to vehicles due to resource constraints and compatibility issues, in this work we present a lightweight technique to enable both a virtual trusted channel and a normal untrusted channel over the same physical CAN-bus network, which we call TrustNet. The goal of TrustNet is to secure CAN-bus sensitive communications by protecting against masquerade and replay attacks with minimum overhead and full legacy support, and at the same time to provide normal-world communications.