Abstract
In vehicles, dozens of electronic control units are connected to one or more controller area network (CAN) buses to exchange information and send commands related to the physical system of the vehicles. Furthermore, modern vehicles are connected to the Internet via telematics control units (TCUs). This leads to an attack vector in which attackers can control vehicles remotely once they gain access to in-vehicle networks (IVNs) and can discover the formats of important messages. Although the format information is kept secret by car manufacturers, CAN is vulnerable, since payloads are transmitted in plain text. In contrast, the secrecy of message formats inhibits IVN security research by third-party researchers. It also hinders effective security tests for in-vehicle networks as performed by evaluation authorities. To mitigate this problem, a method of reverse-engineering CAN payload formats is proposed. The method utilizes classification algorithms to predict signal boundaries from CAN payloads. Several features were uniquely chosen and devised to quantify the type-specific characteristics of signals. The method is evaluated on real-world and synthetic CAN traces, and the results show that our method can predict at least 10% more signal boundaries than the existing methods.
Highlights
Modern vehicles are increasingly connected to the outside world through various channels, such as cellular networks, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and DSRC
Controller Area Network is a communication protocol developed by Bosch in 1983, and it has been widely used in the automotive industry
The in-vehicle networks (IVNs) of a vehicle is composed of a bus network or multiple bus networks with tens of electronic control units (ECUs) connected to the networks
Summary
Modern vehicles are increasingly connected to the outside world through various channels, such as cellular networks, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and DSRC Due to this connectivity, substantial offensive security research on vehicles [1,2,3,4,5,6] has shown that vehicles are susceptible to attacks intended to gain remote access and control. IVNs are bus networks that support information exchange among dozens of electronic control units (ECUs). Communication protocols, such as controller area networks (CAN), CAN-FD, FlexRay, MOST, and Ethernet, are used for IVNs. CAN has the lowest bandwidth among these, it is widely used since it has advantages in terms of cost and robustness [7,8,9]. Receiving nodes only receive messages with the specific IDs they require and ignore the rest of the messages
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