FPGA Based Cyber Security Protocol for Automated Traffic Monitoring Systems: Proposal and Implementation

There is a rapidly growing interest in the field of unmanned road vehicles across the world. To aid the traffic management of such systems, there is an urgent need to develop appropriate security protocols facilitating car-to-car and car-to-traffic controller systems. Ensuring security requires both confidentiality (will be understandable only to intended recipients) as well as authenticity (message is not tampered during communication), both of which are taken care of in an Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) scheme. In this paper, we propose a new AEAD-based protocol for secure and authenticated transmission of videos to the base station captured by traffic monitoring systems in real time. Our protocol utilizes ACORN v2, a lightweight AEAD primitive. For the secret key to be used in encryption-authentication, we use the concept of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). The entire protocol is implemented and evaluated with an FPGA-based prototype, using a 640x480 pixel camera with 30 frames per second. The area required for the proposed protocol is 5% of the total FPGA device (Xilinx Zynq-XC7Z020-1clg484).