Using analog scrambling circuits for automotive sensor integrity and authenticity

Abstract: The automotive domain rapidly increases the embedded amount of complex and interconnected electronics systems. A considerable proportion of them are real-time safety-critical devices and must be protected against cybersecurity attacks. Recent regulations impose carmakers to protect vehicles against replacing trusted electronic hardware and manipulating the information collected by sensors. Analog sensors are critical elements whose security is now strictly regulated by the new UN R155 recommendation but lacks well-developed and established solutions. This work takes a step forward in this direction, adding integrity and authentication to automotive analog sensors proposing a schema to create analog signatures based on a scrambling mechanism implemented with commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) operational amplifiers. The proposed architecture implements a hardware secret and a hard-to-invert exponential function to generate a signal's signature. A prototype of the circuit was implemented and simulated on LTspice. Preliminary results show the feasibility of the proposed schema and provide interesting hints for further developments to increase the robustness of the approach.