AnchorCAN: Anchor-Based Secure CAN Communications System

Vehicles become intelligent and connected for enhancing driving safety and comfort in the latest decade. However, those connectivity interfaces expose vehicles in publicly accessible networks. It gives ways for attackers remotely taking control over vehicles. One reason of the success of the attacks is lack of message authentication and encryption for in-vehicle communications. This article addresses the need of secure in-vehicle CAN communications by proposing a secure CAN communications system, called AnchorCAN, against sniffer, injection and replay attacks. AnchorCAN overcomes the challenges of short payload of CAN frames and occasional unstable CAN transmission without hardware modification on CAN transceivers and without using extra CAN frames for containing authentication information. Performance evaluation is conducted on automotive-grade evaluation boards, and the results show that it takes less than 0.5ms to generate or verify a CAN frame in AnchorCAN while a periodically safety-critical CAN frame is usually sent every 10ms.