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CAN Bus is more like a layer 2 bus, so it should not really bother with encryption, just like Ethernet doesn't provide it. It all comes from the layers above it, and there has been proposal to add encryption or authentication to CAN. The big issue is that in normal CAN you only have 8 bytes to work with.



This is kind of a nitpick, but Ethernet _does_ bother with encryption, at least in recent versions of its standards. Obviously Ethernet has a long history and this is all optional, but it's pretty straightforward to set up 802.1X / MACsec (+MKA) on a LAN in such a way that all traffic is encrypted at L2.

I've never heard of this being used with really low-power embedded stuff, but if you stretch your definition of embedded to the point where you include things running stripped down Linux, this is a pretty viable setup if you have those devices distributed across a LAN with a managed switch in the middle.




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