Draft:Autonomous Key Management

Submission declined on 2 April 2025 by CF-501 Falcon (talk).

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All four citations are written by the same author. The submitters username would make me think they are connected.

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Declined by CF-501 Falcon 7 hours ago. Last edited by CF-501 Falcon 7 hours ago. Reviewer: Inform author.

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Comment: Please add sources written by people other than Jon Shields. CF-501 Falcon (talk · contribs) 19:41, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Autonomous Key Management (AKM) is a decentralized, distributed, ledger-based key management system and multi-point communication security protocol layer, designed primarily for internal automotive vehicle communication. It was created in response to the identified security challenges within the automotive industry in 2014.

History and Development

AKM was developed to address security concerns in automotive vehicle networks, which are considered a microcosm of complex, mission-critical, and safety-critical IoT closed systems. The need for AKM was identified in 2014, driven by the open and unencrypted nature of the automotive bus at the time. AKM aimed to provide a more secure alternative to the then-existing solutions, which were often watered-down implementations of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Design Goals and Requirements

The primary goals of AKM were to simplify the security process within vehicles, eliminate asymmetric key exchange, reduce implementation and maintenance costs, enable shared security credentials among nodes to form a cryptographic trust relationship, and refresh security credentials frequently. These goals were translated into specific requirements, including simplifying authentication, ensuring unique security credentials for each AKM Trust Relationship (ATR), achieving zero-knowledge authentication without a third party, minimizing latency, automating credential refresh, and eliminating common attacks such as Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) and Replay Attacks.

Technical Specifications

AKM operates as a decentralized, distributed, ledger-based key management system and can be implemented on top of UDP and/or TCP, directly on a physical layer driver with a proprietary transport layer, or within the MAC layer. It uses a broadcast architecture to support true multi-point end-to-end encryption, making it a potential drop-in replacement for PKI + TLS.

Features

AKM offers a range of features, including:

Maintenance-free operation once an AKM Trust Relationship (ATR) is provisioned.

Real-time data analytics on a per-frame basis.

Built-in intrusion detection and automatic breach recovery and re-provisioning.

Secure boot with device authentication using AKM Protocol Identifiers and hardware secure elements.

Anti-spoofing and network authorization through unique device association and automatic ATR updates.

Replay attack protection via a replay counter in every frame.

Perfect forward secrecy through the use of a Parameter Data Vector (PDV) for calculating security credentials.

Security credentials that are re-generated rather than derived, ensuring unpredictability.

Enterprise-grade entropy with a minimum PDV size of 128 and a subset size of 15.

Scalability at IoT scale with no limitation on the number of nodes or size of an ATR.

Unlimited AKM Trust Relationships (ATRs) that can coexist on the same node.

Low-power and energy-efficient operation using linear hashing functions and symmetric encryption.

Low-overhead with minimal latency and a small digital footprint.

True multipoint end-to-end encryption for any number of nodes.

Quantum resilience due to the absence of public keys and shared secrets.

Limited threat surface through secure credential storage and the isolation of breaches to individual nodes.

Crypto-agility, allowing for easy replacement of cryptographic components.

Applications

AKM is designed to be versatile and can operate on virtually any type of device, network configuration, and operating system, requiring only a minimalist transport layer. It has been implemented in the past on top of a link-layer driver within a minimalist embedded RTOS.

References

1. Shields, Jon (1 March 2017). "Autonomous Key Management (AKM): A Decentralized, Distributed, Ledger-Based Approach to Automotive Security". SAE International Journal of Connected and Automated Vehicles. 1 (2017–01–2101): 1–11. doi:10.4271/2017-01-2101. ISSN 2688-5577. {{cite journal}}: Check |issn= value (help)

2. US 10382208, Shields, Jon, "Secure communications using organically derived synchronized processes", published 13 August 2019

3. US 10382196, Shields, Jon, "System and method for secure communications based on locally stored values", published 13 August 2019

4. US 10263777, Shields, Jon, "Systems and methods for secure communications using organically derived synchronized encryption processes", published 16 April 2019

Category:Computer security Category:Automotive security Category:Internet of Things