Biblio

While vehicle to everything (V2X) communication enables safety-critical automotive control systems to better support various connected services to improve safety and convenience of drivers, they also allow automotive attack surfaces to increase dynamically in modern vehicles. Many researchers as well as hackers have already demonstrated that they can take remote control of the targeted car by exploiting the vulnerabilities of in-vehicle networks such as Controller Area Networks (CANs). For assuring CAN security, we focus on how to authenticate electronic control units (ECUs) in real-time by addressing the security challenges of in-vehicle networks. In this paper, we propose a novel and lightweight authentication protocol with an attack-resilient tree algorithm, which is based on one-way hash chain. The protocol can be easily deployed in CAN by performing a firmware update of ECU. We have shown analytically that the protocol achieves a high level of security. In addition, the performance of the proposed protocol is validated on CANoe simulator for virtual ECUs and Freescale S12XF used in real vehicles. The results show that our protocol is more efficient than other authentication protocol in terms of authentication time, response time, and service delay.

Modern vehicles may contain a considerable number of ECUs (Electronic Control Units) which are connected through various means of communication, with the CAN (Controller Area Network) protocol being the most widely used. However, several vulnerabilities such as the lack of authentication and the lack of data encryption have been pointed out by several authors, which ultimately render vehicles unsafe to their users and surroundings. Moreover, the lack of security in modern automobiles has been studied and analyzed by other researchers as well as several reports about modern car hacking have (already) been published. The contribution of this work aimed to analyze and test the level of security and how resilient is the CAN protocol by taking a BMW E90 (3-series) instrument cluster as a sample for a proof of concept study. This investigation was carried out by building and developing a rogue device using cheap commercially available components while being connected to the same CAN-Bus as a man in the middle device in order to send spoofed messages to the instrument cluster.

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is a broadcast communications network invented by Robert Bosch GmbH in 1986. CAN is the standard communication network found in automobiles, industry equipment, and many space applications. To be used in these environments, CAN is designed for efficiency and reliability, rather than security. This research paper closely examines the security risks within the CAN protocol and proposes a feasible solution. In this research, we investigate the problems with implementing certain security features in the CAN protocol, such as message authentication and protections against replay and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. We identify the restrictions of the CAN bus, and we demonstrate how our proposed implementation meets these restrictions. Many previously proposed solutions lack security, feasibility, and/or efficiency; however, a solution must not drastically hinder the real-time operation speed of the network. The solution proposed in this research is tested with a simulative CAN environment. This paper proposes an alteration to the standard CAN bus nodes and the CAN protocol to better protect automobiles and other CAN-related systems from attacks.

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is still the most widely employed bus in the automotive sector. Its lack of security mechanisms led to a high number of attacks and consequently several security countermeasures were proposed, i.e., authentication protocols or intrusion detection mechanisms. We discuss vulnerabilities of the CAN data link layer that can be triggered from the application level with the use of an off the shelf CAN transceiver. Namely, due to the wired-AND design of the CAN bus, dominant bits will always overwrite recessive ones, a functionality normally used to assure priority for frames with low value identifiers. We exploit this characteristic and show Denial of Service attacks both on senders and receivers based on bit injections by using bit banging to maliciously control the CAN transceiver. We demonstrate the effects and limitations of such attacks through experimental analysis and discuss possible countermeasures. In particular, these attacks may have high impact on centralized authentication mechanisms that were frequently proposed in the literature since these attacks can place monitoring nodes in a bus-off state for certain periods of time.