Biblio

Nowadays, the growing need to connect modern vehicles through computer networks leads to increased risks of cyberattacks. The internal network, which governs the several electronic components of a vehicle, is becoming increasingly overexposed to external attacks. The Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol, used to interconnect those devices is the key point of the internal network of modern vehicles. Therefore, securing such protocol is crucial to ensure a safe driving experience. However, the CAN is a standard that has undergone little changes since it was introduced in 1983. More precisely, in an attempt to reduce latency, the transfer of information remains unencrypted, which today represents a weak point in the protocol. Hence, the need to protect communications, without introducing low-level alterations, while preserving the performance characteristics of the protocol. In this work, we investigate the possibility of using symmetric encryption algorithms for securing messages exchanged by CAN protocol. In particular, we evaluate the using of lightweight ciphers to secure CAN-level communication. Such ciphers represent a reliable solution on hardware-constrained devices, such as microcontrollers.

Fully connected autonomous vehicles are more vulnerable than ever to hacking and data theft. The controller area network (CAN) protocol is used for communication between in-vehicle control networks (IVN). The absence of basic security features of this protocol, like message authentication, makes it quite vulnerable to a wide range of attacks including spoofing attacks. As traditional cybersecurity methods impose limitations in ensuring confidentiality and integrity of transmitted messages via CAN, a new technique has emerged among others to approve its reliability in fully authenticating the CAN messages. At the physical layer of the communication system, the method of fingerprinting the messages is implemented to link the received signal to the transmitting electronic control unit (ECU). This paper introduces a new method to implement the security of modern electric vehicles. The lumped element model is used to characterize the channel-specific step response. ECU and channel imperfections lead to a unique transfer function for each transmitter. Due to the unique transfer function, the step response for each transmitter is unique. In this paper, we use control system parameters as a feature-set, afterward, a neural network is used transmitting node identification for message authentication. A dataset collected from a CAN network with eight-channel lengths and eight ECUs to evaluate the performance of the suggested method. Detection results show that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 97.4% of transmitter detection.