An architecture for physical injection of complex fault scenarios in CAN networks

It has been reported that some particular fault scenarios may cause malfunction of the controller area network protocol. Although such scenarios are very unlikely, they become relevant when attempting to use the CAN protocol for critical applications. The fault injector described in this paper induces these fault scenarios at the physical layer of the CAN protocol by means of a software tool and a set of specifically designed circuits. Therefore, and in contrast to previous solutions, this fault injector is suitable to evaluate most of the dependability mechanisms that have been proposed for CAN networks.