An Authentication Mechanism for Autonomous Vehicle ECU Utilizing a Novel Slice-Based PUF Design

: Modern autonomous vehicles are getting progressively popular and increasingly getting closer to the core of future development in transportation field. However, there is no reliable authentication mechanism for the unmanned vehicle communication system, this phenomenon draws attention about the security of autonomous vehicles of people in all aspects. Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) circuits is light-weight, and it can product unique and unpredictable digital signature utilizing the manufacturing variations occur in each die and these exact silicon features cannot be recreated theoretically. Considering security issues of communication between Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in vehicles, we propose a novel delay-based PUF circuit using all the available logical components in every two-slice within Configurable Logic Blocks (CLBs) in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips, which is significantly suitable for circuit authentication in ECUs of autonomous vehicles and is a significant improvement over the usual arbiter PUF in resource occupation in FPGA chips, that is to say it can get stronger resistance to security risks with less logic resource overhead. Our PUF design is resource efficient so that it can exactly be applied to the source-constrained devices such as in-vehicle ECUs. It effectively reduce the risk of the messages delivered between ECUs being tampered and then vehicle be illegally controlled by adversary. We simulated the proposed PUF circuit in simulator and implemented it on Xilinx boards under different conditions to obtain experimental results, the analyzed result proves that the proposed PUF satisfies the properties of Uniqueness and Stability. Finally, the ECUs authentication mechanism utilizing our PUF circuit is introduced.