Having everything interconnected through the Internet, including vehicle onboard systems, is making security a primary concern in the automotive domain as well. Although Ethernet and CAN XL provide link-level security based on symmetric cryptography, they do not support origin authentication for multicast transmissions. Asymmetric cryptography is unsuitable for networked embedded control systems with real-time constraints and limited computational resources. In these cases, solutions derived from the TESLA broadcast authentication protocol may constitute a more suitable option. In this paper, some such strategies are presented and analyzed that allow for multicast origin authentication, also improving robustness to frame losses by means of interleaved keychains. A flexible authentication mechanism that relies on a unified receiver is then proposed, which enables transmitters to select strategies at runtime, to achieve the best compromise among security, reliability, and resource consumption.
@article{arxiv.2502.20555,
title = {Robust Multicast Origin Authentication in MACsec and CANsec for Automotive Scenarios},
author = {Gianluca Cena and Lucia Seno and Stefano Scanzio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.20555},
year = {2025}
}