Design and Experimental Validation of Secure Controller Area Network Messaging with the Advanced Encryption Standard
Natale, T., Dibenedetto, M., Dell’Olio, F. (2025) IEEE Embedded Systems Letters
Controller Area Network (CAN) lacks native cryptography, yet many embedded control loops impose millisecond-level deadlines. We implement software-only AES-128 on commodity Cortex-M devices and quantify its real-time cost on classic CAN without changing identifiers, frame lengths, or bus occupancy. Using a purpose-built bench with one STM32F4 master and three STM32F1 slaves, protecting a 16-byte payload increases request–response latency from 540 μs to 829 μs, remaining within a 5 ms application budget…
