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The smart city landscape is rife with opportunities for mobility and economic optimization, but also presents many security concerns spanning the range of components and systems in the smart ecosystem. One key enabler for this ecosystem is smart transportation and transit, which is foundationally built upon connected vehicles. Ensuring vehicular security, while necessary to guarantee passenger and pedestrian safety, is itself challenging due to the broad attack surfaces of modern automotive systems. A single car contains dozens to hundreds of small embedded computing devices known as electronic control units (ECUs) executing 100s of millions of lines of code; the inherent complexity of this tightly-integrated cyber-physical system (CPS) is one of the key problems that frustrates effective security. We describe an approach to help reduce the complexity of security analyses by leveraging unsupervised machine learning to learn clusters of messages passed between ECUs that correlate with changes in the CPS state of a vehicle as it moves through the world. Our approach can help to improve the security of vehicles in a smart city, and can leverage smart city infrastructure to further enrich and refine the quality of the machine learning output. 

The automotive Controller Area Network (CAN) allows Electronic Control Units (ECUs) to communicate with each other and control various vehicular functions such as engine and braking control. Consequently CAN and ECUs are high priority targets for hackers. As CAN implementation details are held as proprietary information by vehicle manufacturers, it can be challenging to decode and correlate CAN messages to specific vehicle operations. To understand the precise meanings of CAN messages, reverse engineering techniques that are time-consuming, manually intensive, and require a physical vehicle are typically used. This work aims to address the process of reverse engineering CAN messages for their functionality by creating a machine learning classifier that analyzes messages and determines their relationship to other messages and vehicular functions. Our work examines CAN traffic of different vehicles and standards to show that it can be applied to a wide arrangement of vehicles. The results show that the function of CAN messages can be determined without the need to manually reverse engineer a physical vehicle. 

The landscape of automotive in-vehicle networks is changing driven by the vast options for infotainment features and progress toward fully-autonomous vehicles. However, the security of automotive networks is lagging behind feature-driven technologies, and new vulnerabilities are constantly being discovered. In this paper, we introduce a road map towards a security solution for in-vehicle networks that can detect anomalous and failed states of the network and adaptively respond in real-time to maintain a fail-operational system. 

The landscape of automotive in-vehicle networks is changing driven by the vast options for infotainment features and progress toward fully-autonomous vehicles. However, the security of automotive networks is lagging behind feature-driven technologies, and new vulnerabilities are constantly being discovered. In this paper, we introduce a road map towards a security solution for in-vehicle networks that can detect anomalous and failed states of the network and adaptively respond in real-time to maintain a fail-operational system.