Are you secure in your car?

Modern vehicles abound with Electronic Control Units ( ECUs) that need to speak with each other. They adopt a binary language and form an in-vehicle network that must be precisely regulated. This was the aim for the inception of "Controller Area Network" protocol, also known as CAN bus [1] and is widespread today. It is standardised in ISO 11898-1:2015 [4] as a simple protocol based on two bus lines. However, it is not meant to be secure. TOUCAN is our new communication protocol designed to be secure while at the same time both CAN and AUTOSAR compliant. It achieves security in terms of authenticity, integrity and confidentiality, yet without the need to upgrade existing ECUs or add components to the network.