Evan Allen (Virginia Tech), Zeb Bowden (Virginia Tech Transportation Institute), J. Scot Ransbottom (Virginia Tech)

Attackers have found numerous vulnerabilities in the Electronic Control Units (ECUs) of modern vehicles, enabling them to stop the car, control its brakes, and take other potentially disruptive actions. Many of these attacks were possible because the vehicles had insecure In-Vehicle Networks (IVNs), where ECUs could send any message to each other. For example, an attacker who compromised an infotainment ECU might be able to send a braking message to a wheel. In this work, we introduce a scheme based on distributed firewalls to block these unauthorized messages according to a set “security policy” defining what transmissions each ECU should be able to send and receive. We leverage the topology of new switched, zonal networks to authenticate messages without cryptography, using Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAMs) to enforce the policy at wire-speed. Crucially, our approach minimizes the security burden on edge ECUs and places control in a set of hardened zonal gateways. Through an OMNeT++ simulation of a zonal IVN, we demonstrate that our scheme has much lower overhead than modern cryptography-based approaches and allows for realtime, low-latency (​<0.1 ms) traffic.

View More Papers

Space-Domain AI Applications need Rigorous Security Risk Analysis

Alexandra Weber (Telespazio Germany GmbH), Peter Franke (Telespazio Germany GmbH)

Read More

LibAFL QEMU: A Library for Fuzzing-oriented Emulation

Romain Malmain (EURECOM), Andrea Fioraldi (EURECOM), Aurelien Francillon (EURECOM)

Read More

Guess Which Car Type I Am Driving: Information Leak...

Dongyao Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Mert D. Pesé (Clemson University), Kang G. Shin (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Read More

Content Censorship in the InterPlanetary File System

Srivatsan Sridhar (Stanford University), Onur Ascigil (Lancaster University), Navin Keizer (University College London), François Genon (UCLouvain), Sébastien Pierre (UCLouvain), Yiannis Psaras (Protocol Labs), Etienne Riviere (UCLouvain), Michał Król (City, University of London)

Read More