CANSentry: Securing CAN-Based Cyber-Physical Systems against Denial and Spoofing Attacks

The Controller Area Network (CAN) has been widely adopted as the de facto standard to support the communication between the ECUs and other computing components in automotive and industrial control systems. In its initial design, CAN only provided very limited security features, which is seriously behind today’s standards for secure communication. The newly proposed security add-ons are still insufficient to defend against the majority of known breaches in the literature. In this paper, we first present a new stealthy denial of service (DoS) attack against targeted ECUs on CAN. The attack is hardly detectable since the actions are perfectly legitimate to the bus. To defend against this new DoS attack and other denial and spoofing attacks in the literature, we propose a CAN firewall, namely CANSentry, that prevents malicious nodes’ misbehaviors such as injecting unauthorized commands or disabling targeted services. We implement CANSentry on a cost-effective and open-source device, to be deployed between any potentially malicious CAN node and the bus, without needing to modify CAN or existing ECUs. We evaluate CANSentry on a testing platform built with parts from a modern car. The results show that CANSentry successfully prevents attacks that have shown to lead to safety-critical implications.