Design and Implementation of a remote keyless entry system using state of the art bidirectional communication and authentication mechanisms – Study Related Research Publication
Master's Thesis Summary
Research has shown that Remote Keyless Entry systems (RKEs) often lack the required security features. RKEs from popular and widely known car manufacturers were successfully broken by attackers. The same also applies for non-automotive applications such as the Mifare Classic card which was used for electronic locking systems. In this thesis, I will design and implement an architecture for a remote keyless entry system solving well-known security issues like wiretapping the communication between the transceivers and extracting the cryptographic key from one of the peer’s memory. The communication between the peers (key fob and lock- controller) will be bidirectional, the authentication will be performed by a challenge response mechanism. An appropriate hardware and necessary components will be selected with regard to power consumption and timing constraints. Evaluating both parameters will give important information about further engineering for the prototype.
Depending on the chosen authentication algorithm, availability of libraries will be checked and evaluated whether they can be used in this context. Another task is to define a commu- nication protocol which transfers the payload between the peers and supports the chosen au- thentication mechanism. Because the system relies on a cryptographic authentication scheme, a cryptographic key must be stored somewhere on both peers. Extracting a key from memory is not a hard task for an attacker, therefore an advanced method of secure key storage will also be considered for the implementation. At the end, a prototype will be build which consists of two peers performing authenticated communication wirelessly.
(Whole thesis can be provided upon request, company confidential information forbids internet publication)