On the Fingerprinting of Electronic Control Units Using Physical Characteristics in Controller Area Networks

Abstract

More and more connected features, like up-to-date maps or car-to-car communication, are added to our vehicles. Besides comfort and environmental benefits, those connections also enable attackers to cause high damages, as Miller and Valasek had shown with their remote hack of a Jeep Cherokee [MV15]. The exploited vulnerability caused a recall of 1.4 million vehicles. Such attacks are possible since no security mechanisms and no sender information are present in the Controller Area Network. Unfortunately, classical cryptographic algorithms cannot be added easily, due to its small payload size. A promising opportunity to increase security is to exploit physical information included in the received messages by extracting fingerprints. These allow to identify the sender of received messages, what can enhance detection or prevention of attacks. In the following, we impart the needed background and give an overview of the two known approaches to expand the Controller Area Network with sender identification.