Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 16, numbers 1 and 2, 2023 // View article

Protected Establishment of a Secondary Network Access Channel

Authors:
Steffen Fries
Rainer Falk

Keywords: communication security; cryptographic channel binding; quality of service; industrial automation and control system; Internet of Things

Abstract:
Several use cases demand for the setup of a separate, dedicated communication channel that provides a specific quality of service or that separates communications of different criticality. Different properties of communication channels are, for instance, performance, latency, but may be also security related. In several cases, a reliable association to an already established communication channel is required. Specifically, if a first communication channel has been securely established, a cryptographic binding of a second communication channel to this first communication channel is needed. One example use case is the charging of electric vehicles. Besides the charging control, also value-added services like software updates for the infotainment system or other parts of the electric vehicle or entertainment services may be provided. To avoid interfering with the charging-related control communications, a second, separate communication channel is established. The two communication channels may require different quality of service. The cryptographic binding allows to perform authorization checks to access value-added services and maybe also to associate the billing of consumed value-added services to the user that has been authenticated in the setup of the first communication channel. The paper provides an overview about existing solutions and proposes an alternative solution that allows establishing arbitrary communication channels of different nature and on different communication layers of the OSI protocol stack. The main example used is the interaction between an electric vehicle and a charging station, but the proposed solution is open to different applications.

Pages: 96 to 105

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2023. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2023

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636