Rohit Bhatia (Purdue University), Vireshwar Kumar (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi), Khaled Serag (Purdue University), Z. Berkay Celik (Purdue University), Mathias Payer (EPFL), Dongyan Xu (Purdue University)

The controller area network (CAN) is widely adopted in modern automobiles to enable communications among in-vehicle electronic control units (ECUs). Lacking mainstream network security capabilities due to resource constraints, the CAN is susceptible to the ECU masquerade attack in which a compromised (attacker) ECU impersonates an uncompromised (victim) ECU and spoofs the latter’s CAN messages. A cost-effective state-of-the-art defense against such attacks is the CAN bus voltage-based intrusion detection system (VIDS), which identifies the source of each message using its voltage fingerprint on the bus. Since the voltage fingerprint emanates from an ECU's hardware characteristics, an attacker ECU by itself cannot controllably modify it. As such, VIDS has been proved effective in detecting masquerade attacks that each involve a single attacker.

In this paper, we discover a novel voltage corruption tactic that leverages the capabilities of two compromised ECUs (i.e., an attacker ECU working in tandem with an accomplice ECU) to corrupt the bus voltages recorded by the VIDS. By exploiting this tactic along with the fundamental deficiencies of the CAN protocol, we propose a novel masquerade attack called DUET, which evades all existing VIDS irrespective of the features and classification algorithms employed in them. DUET follows a two-stage attack strategy to first manipulate a victim ECU’s voltage fingerprint during VIDS retraining mode, and then impersonate the manipulated fingerprint during VIDS operation mode. Our evaluation of DUET on real CAN buses (including three in two real cars) demonstrates an impersonation success rate of at least 90% in evading two state-of-the-art VIDS.

Finally, to mitigate ECU masquerade attacks, we advocate the development of cost-effective defenses that break away from the "attack vs. IDS" arms race. We propose a lightweight defense called RAID, which enables each ECU to make protocol-compatible modifications in its frame format generating a unique dialect (spoken by ECUs) during VIDS retraining mode. RAID prevents corruption of ECUs’ voltage fingerprints, and re-enables VIDS to detect all ECU masquerade attacks including DUET.

View More Papers

WINNIE : Fuzzing Windows Applications with Harness Synthesis and...

Jinho Jung (Georgia Institute of Technology), Stephen Tong (Georgia Institute of Technology), Hong Hu (Pennsylvania State University), Jungwon Lim (Georgia Institute of Technology), Yonghwi Jin (Georgia Institute of Technology), Taesoo Kim (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Read More

From WHOIS to WHOWAS: A Large-Scale Measurement Study of...

Chaoyi Lu (Tsinghua University; Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology), Baojun Liu (Tsinghua University; Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology; Qi An Xin Group), Yiming Zhang (Tsinghua University; Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology), Zhou Li (University of California, Irvine), Fenglu Zhang (Tsinghua University), Haixin Duan…

Read More

Demo #1: Curricular Reinforcement Learning for Robust Policy in...

Yunzhe Tian, Yike Li, Yingxiao Xiang, Wenjia Niu, Endong Tong, and Jiqiang Liu (Beijing Jiaotong University)

Read More

Demo #6: Impact of Stealthy Attacks on Autonomous Robotic...

Pritam Dash, Mehdi Karimibiuki, and Karthik Pattabiraman (University of British Columbia)

Read More