CANOA: CAN Origin Authentication Through Power Side-Channel Monitoring

Abstract

The lack of any sender authentication mechanism in place makes Controller Area Network (CAN) vulnerable to security threats. For instance, an attacker can impersonate an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) on the bus and send spoofed messages unobtrusively with the identifier of the impersonated ECU. To address this problem, we propose a novel source authentication technique that uses power consumption measurements of the ECU to authenticate the source of a message. A transmission of an ECU affects the power consumption and a characteristic pattern will appear. Our technique exploits the power consumption of each ECU during the transmission of a message to determine whether the message actually originated from the purported sender. We evaluate our approach in both a lab setup and a real vehicle. We also evaluate our approach against factors that can impact the power consumption measurement of the ECU. The results of the evaluation show that the proposed technique is applicable in a broad range of operating conditions with reasonable computational power requirements and attaining good accuracy.