Securing Vehicular Controller Area Networks: An Approach to Active Bus-Level Countermeasures

This article describes novel bus-level countermeasures for a controller area network (CAN) bus. The proposed methods use custom CAN hardware that leverages the error confinement functionality in the CAN specification to suppress and eventually control malicious transmissions on the bus. Other attempts to prevent unauthorized transmission have required custom CAN controllers on all electronic control units (ECUs). The methods described in this article require only a single custom controller, keeping cost low and making retrofitting legacy systems more practical. We successfully implemented and tested the proposed design on a reference CAN.