A Digital Watermark Method for In-Vehicle Network Security Enhancement

In recent years, automobiles have become increasingly networked with the development of information and communication technology (ICT). With the enhancement of the connectivity between the electronic control units of the vehicle and the external network, cybersecurity and driving safety issues have also arisen. However, as a traditional in-vehicle network standard, the controller area network (CAN) protocol lacks a network security mechanism design, making it vulnerable to hacker attacks. The current research on the cybersecurity enhancement method for in-vehicle CAN is a multi-objective optimization problem with response time, bandwidth consumption and computational complexity reduction. This study presents an in-vehicle message authentication method based on digital watermark and Huffman coding that are compatible with current CAN bus protocols. Our method not only minimize the delay of message authentication, but also save the storage resources to the greatest extent. Moreover, to tackle the issue of low computing resources, multiple messages can be authenticated at one time. In order to evaluate the performance, we implement our method on CAN communication platform and validate its high accuracy, low latency, and compatibility.