Robust authentication for automotive control networks through covert channels

Abstract

Automotive control networks offer little resistance against security threats that come with the long-range connectivity in modern cars. Remote attacks that undermine the safety of vehicles have been shown to be practical. A range of security mechanisms have been proposed to harden resource-constrained embedded microcontrollers against malicious interference, including cryptographic protocols that establish the authenticity of in-vehicle message exchange. However, authenticated communication comes with repercussions on deployability and vehicle safety in terms of reliability, real-time compliance, backwards compatibility, and bandwidth and resource use.

In this article we investigate benign, defencive uses of covert channels to implement and support vehicular message authentication mechanisms as a transparent, resource-conserving approach to automotive network security. We provide the first comprehensive evaluation of covert channels in Controller Area Networks (CAN) with respect to the attainable bandwidth and reliability of covert communication. Our analysis identifies timing-based covert channels as candidates to design a complementary nonce synchronisation channel that can enhance robustness against message loss in existing authentication schemes. We practically implement and evaluate this design on top of an open-source authenticated CAN communication library, showing that covert timing channels can improve communication robustness in benign circumstances, while not reducing the security guarantees of the underlying authentication primitives when under attack.