A Lightweight and Confidential Communication Scheme for On-Vehicle ECUs

The electronic control unit (ECU) broadcasts and receives data through the on-vehicle bus, enabling the management of the vehicle’s operations and associated functions. Nevertheless, the plaintext broadcast mechanism of the bus exposes the data to potential security threats. Consequently, researchers have explored incorporating technologies like encryption to ensure secure data transmission among various ECUs. However, due to the inherent constrained resources of ECUs and the imperative for low-latency communication, it is challenging to introduce secure mechanisms without causing excessive computational overhead or delays. In this paper, we present a novel lightweight and confidential communication (LiCoom) scheme for on-vehicle ECUs to address this challenge. Our scheme includes a non-interactive key generation and evolution scheme to facilitate key synchronization between different ECUs, followed by the design of a flexible communication scheme for ECUs based on the sensitivity on the transmitted data. Besides the security analysis according to the conceived threat models, we conducted extensive experiments by using various platforms, including laptops and several typical TBoxs. The experimental results show that our proposal imposes on ECUs neither significant computational overhead nor observable delays.