The Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol used in vehicles today was designed to be fast, reliable, and robust. However, it is inherently insecure due to its lack of any kind of message authentication. Despite this, CAN is still used extensively in the automotive industry for various electronic control units (ECUs) and sensors which perform critical functions such as engine control. This paper presents a novel methodology for in-vehicle security through fingerprinting of ECUs. The proposed research uses the fingerprints injected in the signal due to material imperfections and semiconductor impurities. By extracting features from the physical CAN signal and using them as inputs for a machine learning algorithm, it is possible to determine the sender ECU of a packet. A high classification accuracy of up to 100.0% is possible when every node on the bus has a sufficiently different channel length.
This content will become publicly available on May 30, 2023
ShadowAuth: Backward-Compatible Automatic CAN Authentication for Legacy ECUs
Controller Area Network (CAN) is the de-facto standard in-vehicle network system. Despite its wide adoption by automobile manufacturers, the lack of security design makes it vulnerable to attacks. For instance, broadcasting packets without authentication allows the impersonation of electronic control units (ECUs). Prior mitigations, such as message authentication or intrusion detection systems, fail to address the compatibility requirement with legacy ECUs, stealthy and sporadic malicious messaging, or guaranteed attack detection. We propose a novel authentication system called ShadowAuth that overcomes the aforementioned challenges by offering backward-compatible packet authentication to ECUs without requiring ECU firmware source code. Specifically, our authentication scheme provides transparent CAN packet authentication without modifying existing CAN packet definitions (e.g., J1939) via automatic ECU firmware instrumentation technique to locate CAN packet transmission code, and instrument authentication code based on the CAN packet behavioral transmission patterns. ShadowAuth enables vehicles to detect state-of-the-art CAN attacks, such as bus-off and packet injection, responsively within 60ms without false positives. ShadowAuth provides a sound and deployable solution for real-world ECUs.
- Award ID(s):
- 2145744
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10373344
- Journal Name:
- Asia CCS'22
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 534 to 545
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol used in vehicles today was designed to be fast, reliable, and robust. However, it is inherently insecure due to its lack of any kind of message authentication. Despite this, CAN is still used extensively in the automotive industry for various electronic control units (ECUs) and sensors which perform critical functions such as engine control. This paper presents a novel methodology for in-vehicle security through fingerprinting of ECUs. The proposed research uses the fingerprints injected in the signal due to material imperfections and semiconductor impurities. By extracting features from the physical CAN signal and using them as inputs for a machine learning algorithm, it is possible to determine the sender ECU of a packet. A high classification accuracy of up to 100.0% is possible when every node on the bus has a sufficiently different channel length.
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