The automotive industry has been evolving with the increased number of sensors, actuators, bandwidth requirements, and advanced features. It is thus expected for vehicles to hold and process large amounts of data of 500GB per hour if fully autonomous from several nodes and sensors communicating together to materialize advanced features in future vehicular systems by 2025. However, Automotive Ethernet (AE) is in boom accommodating this large amount of data, bandwidths, and latency requirements, co-existing with other protocols like CAN, LIN, MOST, FlexRay, etc., that match various use cases at present and in the future. Given the performance of this AE, it is essential to secure this data in transit and evaluate its performance tradeoffs.

In this research study, we have attempted to recommend the best security solution with a proof-of-concept level implementation on mapping a sub-architecture of real-world cases. Besides the performance tradeoffs against the security solutions, we have also tested the interoperability of secure communication with non-secure communication on a data link to investigate the impact of using these protocols in the vehicle system. 

We have presented interoperability results, and performance tradeoffs for different security solutions like MACsec, VLAN, MACsec over VLAN, IPsec, TLS, and VPN from the AE OSI Stack. We have finally recommended the best security solutions based on our results.