Paper 2020/918

An Efficient Certificateless Authentication Protocol for the SAE J1939

Basker Palaniswamy

Abstract

Authentication continues to be a challenge for legacy real-time communications networks involving low-speed buses interconnecting resource-limited devices. A commercial vehicle network is such a network which does not change much over the years due to safety standards and regulations in the transportation domain. The SAE J1939 incorporating the ISO 11898- 1 specification for the data link and physical layers of the standard CAN and CAN-flexible data rate (CAN-FD) handles communication among electronic control units (ECUs). The SAE J1939 is susceptible to attacks such as replay, masquerading and man-in-the-middle. This paper presents a formal analysis of the existing authentication protocols for the SAE J1939 and identifies limitation, especially man-in-the-middle attack. To mitigate the attack, we propose two new authentication protocols. One pass authentication protocol is proposed for computationally restricted nodes, and for the nodes that support public key operations, a certificateless signature-based authentication protocol is proposed which is based on certificateless key insulated manageable signature scheme (CL-KIMS). The security of the new protocol suite and the signature scheme is formally analysed in the random oracle model. We use the Tamarin tool to verify mutual authentication, session key security, known key secrecy and forward security of the proposed protocols. Performance comparison shows that compared with the existing protocol suite, the new protocol suite is computation and communication efficient with robust security. Our simulation study in Matlab 2018a reveals that the key exchange protocols in the new protocol suite are efficient regarding consumption of lesser total message delay than its counterpart.