Security Threats and Countermeasures for Intra-vehicle Networks

Controller area network (CAN) is the leading serial bus system for embedded control. More than two billion CAN nodes have been sold since the protocol's development in the early 1980s. CAN is a mainstream network and was internationally standardized (ISO 11898-1) in 1993. This paper describes an approach to implementing security services on top of a higher level controller area network (CAN) protocol, in particular, CANopen. Since the CAN network is an open, unsecured network, every node has access to all data on the bus. A system which produces and consumes sensitive data is not well suited for this environment. Therefore, a general-purpose security solution is needed which will allow secure nodes access to the basic security services such as authentication, integrity, and confidentiality.