A PUF-based Authentication and Key Distribution Scheme for In-Vehicle Network

With the increasing connectivity between and within vehicles, in-vehicle network security has received considerable attention. As the most widely used protocol in in-vehicle network, Controller Area Network (CAN) bus lacks security mechanisms by design, and is vulnerable to various attacks. Although many frameworks have been proposed to solve the security issues of CAN buses, spoofing attacks by compromised Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and reducing message latency while ensuring security remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose an authentication and key distribution scheme for the CAN bus. Specifically, the scheme includes ECU identity authentication, key distribution, and authentication of data frames. By utilizing physically unclonable functions (PUF) technique, each ECU avoids the risk of long-term key leakage, simplifies the key distribute process, and reduces the communication overhead of vehicles. Compared with the state-of-the-art group-based schemes, the proposed scheme has lower computational and communication overhead.