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A Survey on Controller Area Network Reverse Engineering

  • Controller Area Network (CAN) is a masterless serial bus designed and widely used for the exchange of mission and time-critical information within commercial vehicles. In-vehicle communication is based on messages sent and received by Electronic Control Units (ECUs) connected to this serial bus network. Although unencrypted, CAN messages are not easy to interpret. In fact, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) attempt to achieve security through obscurity by encoding the data in their proprietary format, which is kept secret from the general public. As a result, the only way to obtain clear data is to reverse engineer CAN messages. Driven by the need for in-vehicle message interpretation, which is highly valuable in the automotive industry, researchers and companies have been working to make this process automated, fast, and standardized. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the state of the art and summarize the major advances in CAN bus reverse engineering. We are the first to provide a taxonomy of CAN tokenizationController Area Network (CAN) is a masterless serial bus designed and widely used for the exchange of mission and time-critical information within commercial vehicles. In-vehicle communication is based on messages sent and received by Electronic Control Units (ECUs) connected to this serial bus network. Although unencrypted, CAN messages are not easy to interpret. In fact, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) attempt to achieve security through obscurity by encoding the data in their proprietary format, which is kept secret from the general public. As a result, the only way to obtain clear data is to reverse engineer CAN messages. Driven by the need for in-vehicle message interpretation, which is highly valuable in the automotive industry, researchers and companies have been working to make this process automated, fast, and standardized. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the state of the art and summarize the major advances in CAN bus reverse engineering. We are the first to provide a taxonomy of CAN tokenization and translation techniques. Based on the reviewed literature, we highlight an important issue: the lack of a public and standardized dataset for the quantitative evaluation of translation algorithms. In response, we define a complete set of requirements for standardizing the data collection process. We also investigate the risks associated with the automation of CAN reverse engineering, in particular with respect to the security network and the safety and privacy of drivers and passengers. Finally, we discuss future research directions in CAN reverse engineering.show moreshow less

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Metadaten
Author: Alessio Buscemi, Ion Turcanu, German Castignani, Andriy Panchenko, Thomas Engel, Kang G. Shin
URL:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10092880
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2023.3264928
ISSN:1553-877X
Title of the source (English):IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
Publisher:IEEE
Document Type:Scientific journal article peer-reviewed
Language:English
Year of publication:2023
Tag:Can bus; connected Vechiles; reverse engineering; security
Volume/Year:25
Issue number:3,3
First Page:1445
Last Page:1481
Faculty/Chair:Fakultät 1 MINT - Mathematik, Informatik, Physik, Elektro- und Informationstechnik / FG IT-Sicherheit
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