LOKI: A Lightweight Cryptographic Key Distribution Protocol for Controller Area Networks

The recent advancement in the automotive sector has led to a technological explosion. As a result, the modern car provides a wide range of features supported by state of the art hardware and software. Unfortunately, while this is the case of most major components, in the same vehicle we find dozens of sensors and sub-systems built over legacy hardware and software with limited computational capabilities. This paper presents LOKI, a lightweight cryptographic key distribution scheme applicable in the case of the classical invehicle communication systems. The LOKI protocol stands out compared to already proposed protocols in the literature due to its ability to use only a single broadcast message to initiate the generation of a new cryptographic key across a group of nodes. It's lightweight key derivation algorithm takes advantage of a reverse hash chain traversal algorithm to generate fresh session keys. Experimental results consisting of a laboratory-scale system based on Vector Informatik's CANoe simulation environment demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed methodology and its seamless impact manifested on the network. (10.1109/ICCP51029.2020.9266192)