SecProtobuf: Implicit Message Integrity Provision in Heterogeneous Vehicular Systems

Novel vehicular applications, such as remote driving, platooning, and autonomous driving systems are increasing the complexity of networked vehicular systems. These Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) (V2X) usecases require strong security (and privacy) guarantees, authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation. Standardization bodies and harmonization efforts provide complex data structures for basic safety messages, mandated to be digitally signed and validated. Due to the complex data structures, the multiplicity of use-cases, the rapid deployment, as well as the need for interoperability among Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), developing the code needed to provide security becomes a more challenging, error prone, and time consuming task; even more so as the scale of Vehicular Communication (VC) systems grow. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose SecProtobuf, a novel security framework to automate the signature generation and validation procedures for any VC safety and non-safety data structures. Our framework facilitates the serialisation and deserialisation processes for arbitrarily complex data types, thus, mitigating potential security defect risks and catalyzing the deployment. In order to ensure the correct usage of the framework by developers, SecProtobuf is provided with a static code analysis (linter).