Crypto-Chain: A Relay Resilience Framework for Smart Vehicles

Abstract

Recent findings show that smart vehicles can be exposed to relay attacks resulting from weaknesses in cryptographic operations, such as authentication and key derivation, or poor implementation of these operations. Relay attacks refer to attacks in which authentication is evaded without needing to attack a smart vehicle itself. They are a recurrent problem in practice. In this paper, we formulate the necessary relay resilience settings for strengthening authentication and key derivation and achieving the secure design and efficient implementation of cryptographic protocols based on universal composability, which allows the modular design and analysis of cryptographic protocols. We introduce Crypto-Chain, a relay resilience framework that extends Kusters’s universal composition theorem on a fixed number of protocol systems to prevent bypass of cryptographic operations and avoid implementation errors. Our framework provides an ideal crypto-chain functionality that supports several cryptographic primitives. Furthermore, we provide an ideal functionality for mutual authentication and key derivation in Crypto-Chain by which cryptographic protocols can use cryptographic operations, knowledge about the computation time of the operations, and cryptographic timestamps to ensure relay resilience. As a proof of concept, we first propose and implement a mutual authentication and key derivation protocol (MKD) that confirms the efficiency and relay resilience capabilities of Crypto-Chain and then apply Crypto-Chain to fix two protocols used in smart vehicles, namely Megamos Crypto and Hitag-AES/Pro.