Automotive Security

While vehicles may currently be using a mix of LIN, CAN and MOST^® technologies, the industry shift to a service-oriented architecture will mean the addition of more and more Ethernet nodes on the cable harness. Microchip has been a leading player in LIN and CAN since its creation and is the number one supplier of automotive Ethernet nodes. Because of this, we understand where the market is, where it’s going and how to best anticipate and meet your needs.

Security is not something that exists purely at a component level. There are many levels where secure processes and technologies must be implemented. With more than 20 years of experience in manufacturing security products, we leverage the hardware-based security developed for other industry sectors to add real physical protection to automotive networks. We have invested in the secure physical implementation of a manufacturing workflow that allows clients’ keys and certificates to be provisioned on our products in our secure facilities for parts that run in phenomenally high volumes. We provide full audit trails, compliance with many industry standards and are prepared to support new schemes evolving in the automotive sector.

Inside the vehicle, many Electronic Control Units (ECUs) must coexist and interoperate with each other while maintaining the integrity of the passing data. We provide a variety of solutions that work with crypto standards in the cloud and have adapted these to the automotive framework to provide the same certificate, key agreement, authentication and content protection functions, including:

• A means to provide authenticated CAN messages and prevent man in the middle attacks
• Secure boot of ECUs and the addition of secure boot functions to legacy processors
• Flexible implementation of many crypto functions