Visible to the public Vulnerability of Controller Area Network to Schedule-Based Attacks

TitleVulnerability of Controller Area Network to Schedule-Based Attacks
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2021
AuthorsHounsinou, Sena, Stidd, Mark, Ezeobi, Uchenna, Olufowobi, Habeeb, Nasri, Mitra, Bloom, Gedare
Conference Name2021 IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS)
KeywordsBus off-Attack, control systems, controller area network, controller area network security, Cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things, Land vehicles, Perturbation methods, pubcrawl, Real-time Systems, Resiliency, Safety, Schedule Based Attack, Schedules, Synchronization
AbstractThe secure functioning of automotive systems is vital to the safety of their passengers and other roadway users. One of the critical functions for safety is the controller area network (CAN), which interconnects the safety-critical electronic control units (ECUs) in the majority of ground vehicles. Unfortunately CAN is known to be vulnerable to several attacks. One such attack is the bus-off attack, which can be used to cause a victim ECU to disconnect itself from the CAN bus and, subsequently, for an attacker to masquerade as that ECU. A limitation of the bus-off attack is that it requires the attacker to achieve tight synchronization between the transmission of the victim and the attacker's injected message. In this paper, we introduce a schedule-based attack framework for the CAN bus-off attack that uses the real-time schedule of the CAN bus to predict more attack opportunities than previously known. We describe a ranking method for an attacker to select and optimize its attack injections with respect to criteria such as attack success rate, bus perturbation, or attack latency. The results show that vulnerabilities of the CAN bus can be enhanced by schedule-based attacks.
DOI10.1109/RTSS52674.2021.00051
Citation Keyhounsinou_vulnerability_2021