Enhancing security in CAN systems using a star coupling router

Abstract

Controller Area Network (CAN) is the most widely used protocol in the automotive domain. Bus-based CAN does not provide any security mechanisms to counter manipulations like eavesdropping, fabrication of messages, or denial-of-service attacks. The vulnerabilities in bus-based CAN are alarming, because safety-critical subsystems (e.g., the power train) often deploy a CAN bus, and hence a failure propagation from the security domain to the safety domain can take place. In this paper we propose a star coupling router and a trust model for this router to overcome some of the security deficiencies present in bus-based CAN systems. The CAN router establishes a partitioning of a CAN bus into separate CAN segments and allows to rigorously check the traffic within the CAN system, including the value and time domains. We evaluate the introduced trust model on a prototype implementation of the CAN router by performing attacks that would be successful on classic bus-based CAN, but are detected and contained on router-based CAN. The router can consequently increase the security in automotive applications and render some of the attacks described in the literature (e.g., fuzzying attack) on a car useless. Since the CAN router offers ports that are compatible to standard CAN, the router can be used to increase the security of legacy CAN based systems.