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.