A Performance Evaluation of CAN Encryption

Recent research on vehicular cybersecurity has highlighted the known vulnerabilities and exploits that plague in-vehicular networks; in particular, the communication protocol governing the in-vehicular network, the Control Area Network (CAN), has been a frequent and often fruitful target of related attacks. Accordingly, the focus of this project is to investigate the application of encryption algorithms to the in-vehicular network and evaluate the performance characteristics of said algorithms when used in this context. This current paper includes examination of a) the maximum acceptable latency based on the vehicular requirements as well as b) the latency in communication when employing various encryption algorithms. In Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulations, our work suggests that in-vehicular networks can absorb the latencies introduced by select encryption approaches and still satisfy the real-time requirements needed by the intra-vehicular communication system to avoid collisions and the like.