Jitter-Based Authentication for Automotive Wireline Networks

This paper proposes a new authentication approach targeted to wireline broadcast communication systems for automotive and industrial applications. The proposed approach leverages jitter amplification in wireline channels, that become stronger features for message-source authentication with higher data rate or channel loss, to provide a low-overhead physical layer authentication. The fundamentals of jitter amplification are reviewed and the use of it as a feature for authentication while maintaining high signal integrity is explored. Simulations using a Simulink model of an example automotive link with multiple electronic control units (ECUs) are used to show the efficacy of the proposed message source authentication scheme. The simulation results also show significant resilience of the proposed approach to noise. Measurement results using a bench-top setup show that the proposed feature detection approach has a high degree of authentication accuracy in a real-time application and provides a low-cost alternative to prevailing software-based approaches.