Biblio

Recent years have seen an increase in the data usage in cars, particularly as they become more autonomous and connected. With the rise in data use have come concerns about automotive cyber-security. An in-vehicle network shown to be particularly vulnerable is the Controller Area Network (CAN), which is the communication bus used by the car's safety critical and performance critical components. Cyber attacks on the CAN have been demonstrated, leading to research to develop attack detection and attack prevention systems. Such research requires representative attack demonstrations and data for testing. Obtaining this data is problematical due to the expense, danger and impracticality of using real cars on roads or tracks for example attacks. Whilst CAN simulators are available, these tend to be configured for testing conformance and functionality, rather than analysing security and cyber vulnerability. We therefore adapt a leading, industry-standard, CAN simulator to incorporate a core set of cyber attacks that are representative of those proposed by other researchers. Our adaptation allows the user to configure the attacks, and can be added easily to the free version of the simulator. Here we describe the simulator and, after reviewing the attacks that have been demonstrated and discussing their commonalities, we outline the attacks that we have incorporated into the simulator.

There is a need for new tools and techniques to aid automotive engineers performing cybersecurity testing on connected car systems. This is in order to support the principle of secure-by-design. Our research has produced a method to construct useful automotive security tooling and tests. It has been used to implement Controller Area Network (CAN) fuzz testing (a dynamic security test) via a prototype CAN fuzzer. The black-box fuzz testing of a laboratory vehicle's display ECU demonstrates the value of a fuzzer in the automotive field, revealing bugs in the ECU software, and weaknesses in the vehicle's systems design.