On Securing Vehicular Communications: Methods and Recommendations for Secure In-vehicle and Car2X Communications
Licentiate thesis, 2017

Today's vehicles contain approximately more than 100 interconnected computers (ECUs), several of which will be connected to the Internet or external devices and networks around the vehicle. In the near future vehicles will extensively communicate with their environment via Vehicle to Vehicle and Vehicle to Infrastructure (together called V2X) communications. Such level of connectivity enables car manufacturers to implement new entertainment systems and to provide safety features to decrease the number of road accidents. Moreover, authorities can deploy the traffic information provided by vehicular communications to improve the traffic management. Despite the great benefits that comes with vehicular communications, there are also risks associated with exposing a safety-critical integrated system to external networks. It has already been proved that vehicles can be remotely hacked and the safety critical functions such as braking system and steering wheel can be compromised to endanger the safety of passengers. This puts high demands on IT security and car manufacturers to secure vehicular communications. In this thesis, we propose methods and recommendations for improving the security of internal and external vehicular communications. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, we identify weaknesses or deficiencies in the design of the ETSI V2X security standard and propose changes to fix the identified weaknesses or deficiencies. The second part of the thesis focuses on the security of the internal vehicular communications. First, in order to facilitate the implementation of security measures in in-vehicle networks, we propose an automated approach for grouping in-vehicle ECUs into domains based on different criteria. Then, we compare such an automatically generated in-vehicle network architecture with a reference architecture model to show that our approach is able to identify meaningful domains with better quality with respect to communication, safety and security. Finally, we seek to evaluate the applicability of existing CAN bus authentication solutions to a vehicular context. To this end, and in cooperation with industry, we have identified five critical requirements for an authentication solution to be used in such a context. We found that no authentication solution fulfilled all the requirements, something that indicates that the CAN bus may not be suitable for secure vehicular applications.

V2X

in-vehicle network

vehicular communication

security

ETSI

HC1, EDIT building, Hörsalsvägen 10, Chalmers University of Technology
Opponent: Dr. Hendrik Schweppe, BMW Research and Technology, Munich, Germany

Author

Nasser Nowdehi

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

Experiences from Implementing the ETSI ITS SecuredMessage Service

2014 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium. June 8 - 11, 2014, Dearborn, Michigan, USA,; (2014)p. 1055-1060

Paper in proceeding

Improving In-Vehicle Network Architectures Using Automated Partitioning Algorithms

IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), Proceedings. Kyoto, December 16-18, 2015,; Vol. 2016-January(2016)p. 259 - 266

Paper in proceeding

Towards designing secure in-vehicle network architectures using community detection algorithms

IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC), Proceedings. Paderborn, 3-5 Dec. 2014,; Vol. 2015-January(2015)p. 69-76

Paper in proceeding

N. Nowdehi, A. Lautenbach and T. Olovsson, In-vehicle CAN message authentication: An evaluation based on industrial criteria

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Transport

Subject Categories

Communication Systems

Embedded Systems

Computer Systems

Technical report L - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University: 160L

Publisher

Chalmers

HC1, EDIT building, Hörsalsvägen 10, Chalmers University of Technology

Opponent: Dr. Hendrik Schweppe, BMW Research and Technology, Munich, Germany

More information

Created

2/10/2017