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.

中文翻译：

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车载 ECU 的轻量级保密通信方案


电子控制单元（ECU）通过车载总线广播和接收数据，从而能够管理车辆的操作和相关功能。然而，总线的明文广播机制使数据面临潜在的安全威胁。因此，研究人员探索了结合加密等技术来确保各种 ECU 之间数据传输的安全。然而，由于 ECU 固有的有限资源以及低延迟通信的必要性，在不导致过多计算开销或延迟的情况下引入安全机制具有挑战性。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的车载 ECU 轻量级保密通信 (LiCoom) 方案来应对这一挑战。我们的方案包括非交互式密钥生成和演化方案，以促进不同 ECU 之间的密钥同步，然后根据传输数据的敏感性为 ECU 设计灵活的通信方案。除了根据设想的威胁模型进行安全分析外，我们还使用各种平台（包括笔记本电脑和几种典型的TBox）进行了广泛的实验。实验结果表明，我们的建议既没有给 ECU 带来显着的计算开销，也没有带来可观察到的延迟。