Abstract
Current research in the automotive domain has proven the limitations of the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol from a security standpoint. Application-layer attacks, which involve the creation of malicious packets, are deemed feasible from remote but can be easily detected by modern Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). On the other hand, more recent link-layer attacks are stealthier and possibly more disruptive but require physical access to the bus. In this paper, we present CANflict, a software-only approach that allows reliable manipulation of the CAN bus at the data link layer from an unmodified microcontroller, overcoming the limitations of state-of-the-art works. We demonstrate that it is possible to deploy stealthy CAN link-layer attacks from a remotely compromised ECU, targeting another ECU on the same CAN network. To do this, we exploit the presence of pin conflicts between microcontroller peripherals to craft polyglot frames, which allows an attacker to control the CAN traffic at the bit level and bypass the protocol's rules. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on high-, mid-, and low-end microcontrollers, and we provide the ground for future research by releasing an extensible tool that can be used to implement our approach on different platforms and to build CAN countermeasures at the data link layer.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | CCS '22 |
Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
Pages | 711-723 |
Number of pages | 13 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450394505 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Nov 2022 |
Event | 28th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2022 - Los Angeles, United States Duration: 7 Nov 2022 → 11 Nov 2022 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security |
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ISSN (Print) | 1543-7221 |
Conference
Conference | 28th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2022 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Los Angeles |
Period | 7/11/22 → 11/11/22 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the Dutch Science Organization NWO through project Intersect.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.
Keywords
- automotive security
- conflicting peripherals
- controller area network
- hardware attacks
- polyglot frames