Hardware-accelerated data acquisition and authentication for high-speed video streams on future heterogeneous automotive processing platforms

With the increasing use of Ethernet-based communication backbones in safety-critical real-time domains, both efficient and predictable interfacing and cryptographically secure authentication of high-speed data streams are becoming very important. Although the increasing data rates of in-vehicle networks allow the integration of more demanding (e.g., camera-based) applications, processing speeds and, in particular, memory bandwidths are no longer scaling accordingly. The need for authentication, on the other hand, stems from the ongoing convergence of traditionally separated functional domains and the extended connectivity both in- (e.g., smart-phones) and outside (e.g., telemetry, cloud-based services and vehicle-to-X technologies) current vehicles. The inclusion of cryptographic measures thus requires careful interface design to meet throughput, latency, safety, security and power constraints given by the particular application domain. Over the last decades, this has forced system designers to not only optimize their software stacks accordingly, but also incrementally move interface functionalities from software to hardware. This paper discusses existing and emerging methods for dealing with high-speed data streams ranging from software-only via mixed-hardware/software approaches to fully hardware-based solutions. In particular, we introduce two approaches to acquire and authenticate GigE Vision Video Streams at full line rate of Gigabit Ethernet on Programmable SoCs suitable for future heterogeneous automotive processing platforms.