Windowed Hamming Distance-Based Intrusion Detection for the CAN Bus

Abstract

The use of a Controller Area Network (CAN) bus in the automotive industry for connecting electronic control units (ECUs) poses security vulnerabilities due to the lack of built-in security features. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) have emerged as a practical solution for safeguarding the CAN bus. However, developing an effective IDS for in-vehicle CAN buses encounters challenges in achieving high precision for detecting attacks and meeting real-time requirements with limited computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method for anomaly detection on CAN data using windowed Hamming distance. Our approach utilizes sliding windows and Hamming distance to extract features from time series data. By creating benchmark windows that span at least one cycle of data, we compare newly generated windows with recorded benchmarks using the Hamming distance to identify abnormal CAN messages. During the experimental phase, we conduct extensive testing on both the public car-hack dataset and a proprietary dataset. The experimental results indicate that our method achieves an impressive accuracy of up to 99.67% in detecting Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and an accuracy of 98.66% for fuzzing attacks. In terms of two types of spoofing attacks, our method achieves detection accuracies of 99.48% and 99.61%, respectively, significantly outperforming the methods relying solely on the Hamming distance. Furthermore, in terms of detection time, our method significantly reduces the time consumption by nearly 20-fold compared to the approach using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN), decreasing it from 6.7 ms to 0.37 ms.