Visible to the public VALID: Voltage-Based Lightweight Intrusion Detection for the Controller Area Network

TitleVALID: Voltage-Based Lightweight Intrusion Detection for the Controller Area Network
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsSchell, Oleg, Kneib, Marcel
Conference Name2020 IEEE 19th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)
Date Publisheddec
Keywordsautomotive security, controller area network, controller area network security, Cyber-physical systems, Hardware, Internet of Things, Intrusion detection, message authentication, privacy, pubcrawl, Resiliency, security, Voltage control, Voltage fluctuations
AbstractThe Controller Area Network (CAN), a broadcasting bus for intra-vehicle communication, does not provide any security mechanisms, although it is implemented in almost every vehicle. Attackers can exploit this issue, transmit malicious messages unnoticeably and cause severe harm. As the utilization of Message Authentication Codes (MACs) is only possible to a limited extent in resource-constrained systems, the focus is put on the development of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Due to their simple idea of operation, current developments are increasingly utilizing physical signal properties like voltages to realize these systems. Although the feasibility for CAN-based networks could be demonstrated, the least approaches consider the constrained resource-availability of vehicular hardware. To close this gap, we present Voltage-Based Lightweight Intrusion Detection (VALID), which provides physics-based intrusion detection with low resource requirements. By utilizing solely the individual voltage levels on the network during communication, the system detects unauthorized message transmissions without any sophisticated sampling approaches and feature calculations. Having performed evaluations on data from two real vehicles, we show that VALID is not only able to detect intrusions with an accuracy of 99.54 %, but additionally is capable of identifying the attack source reliably. These properties make VALID one of the most lightweight intrusion detection approaches that is ready-to-use, as it can be easily implemented on hardware already installed in vehicles and does not require any further components. Additionally, this allows existing platforms to be retrofitted and vehicular security systems to be improved and extended.
DOI10.1109/TrustCom50675.2020.00041
Citation Keyschell_valid_2020