Secure and Low-Delay CAN-FD Communication in Embedded Microcontroller: A Cooperative Swapping Approach

As promising industrial embedded networks, Controller Area Networks with Flexible Data-rate (CAN-FD) are widely used in time-sensitive domains, such as automotive networks. However, the absence of built-in security mechanisms in CAN-FD necessitates the development of security protection mechanisms. The existing Lightweight Authentication for Secure Automotive Networks (LASAN) framework focuses on enhancing the security of CAN/CAN-FD communication but neglects the conflict between security and delay. In this study, we conduct a thorough analysis of the causal mechanism related to the security and delay of LASAN and propose a static message scheduling method called Cooperative Swapping Approach (CSA) to achieve secure and low-delay CAN-FD communication. CSA is to minimize the end-to-end delay of precedence-constrained CAN-FD applications by swapping message positions in a valid message sequence. Nevertheless, exchanging message positions may impact the precedence dependencies between messages; therefore, we propose a novel Cooperative Transform Approach (CTA) within the CSA to efficiently preserve these precedence constraints. Valid message sequences with minimal end-to-end delays of a motivation example and an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) application are obtained in LASAN by CSA. These sequences are implemented on the embedded microcontroller platform of STM32H743IITs for evaluation. Experimental results show that our proposed CSA can effectively reduce the end-to-end delay of LASAN and outperform the state-of-the-art static message scheduling method in terms of low delay.