Patent attributes
A system authenticates in-vehicle electronic devices having unequal capabilities such as having varying different communication and processing capabilities. A Connected Vehicle Gateway portion of a selected in-vehicle device acts as an onboard authentication proxy and onboard key server functionality for other in-vehicle devices, and serves as an interface between an in-vehicle network and one or more associated external networks, thereby eliminating the need for explicit peer discovery protocol and the requirement of devices to perform key establishment with each individual communication peer. Instead, each in-vehicle device establishes the group keys as a result of its authentication with the onboard key server and uses the group keys to locally generate and update its session keys. The onboard key server selectively obtains the keys from one or more off-board authentication servers and distributes them to selected in-vehicle devices.