Increasing system security in electric vehicles

With the advancement of technology, there is a change process in vehicles and automotive electronics. In this direction, the place of electric vehicles in our lives has increased, features and devices such as advanced electronic devices, smart vehicle features, advanced driver assistance systems have been widely used in the automotive industry. The number of Electronic Control Units (ECU) used in vehicles is increasing and in addition to these control units, electronic components and features such as many screens, modems, infotainment systems and advanced driver assistance systems have begun to take their place in electric vehicles. All these features and electronic components require the use of many sensors and ECUs. High security level data coming from sensors are transferred to controllers via different communication protocols and processed by the controllers. By manipulating these highly secure data from the outside, critical features of the vehicle (steering wheel, accelerator pedal, brake, lock, etc.) can be controlled. With the introduction of advanced versions of infotainment and connectivity features in vehicles, vehicles have become able to communicate with external units. Features such as Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) and Over-the-Air (OTA) updates for ECU software updates are used in vehicles. Data received from the cloud and the internet to the vehicle is used by some ECUs in the in-vehicle network and controls some critical features in the vehicle. In this case, both external communication and in-vehicle communication must be performed securely. In this study, it is aimed to increase the system security of the electric vehicle by designing a secure in-vehicle communication system with an encryption mechanism that includes Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Exclusive Or (XOR) encryption methods and authentication function. A hybrid system was created using Controller Area Network (CAN) and Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) communication protocols. An increase in encryption security has been achieved by using random numbers in encryption processes. With all these operations, it is aimed to ensure that critical and important data in the vehicle communication network cannot be accessed, interpreted and manipulated externally.