A Testbed for a Controller Area Network Communication Protocol in Automobiles

Automobiles are now becoming sophisticated as they are built with several nodes interacting together for the vehicle's overall functionality. A node in a car can be the engine, the audio system, the navigation system, or the airbags, and they all exchange data within the system. The exchange of data within an automobile is made possible by an in vehicle communication protocol. Using an mbed platform, we created a testbed for an in-vehicle protocol called the Controller Area Network protocol for an automobile. Our ultimate objective for the development of this system is to create a base system that can be used for the analysis of CAN bus security threats. In this paper, we highlight the necessary hardware and steps required to create a functioning system that operates using the CAN protocol. Our system had four major nodes communicating via the in-vehicle communication protocol and we collected and analyzed the traffic generated using a sniffer compatible with the aforementioned protocol. Subsequently, we attached a protocol decoder to validate the data sent within the system.