Viden: Attacker Identification on In-Vehicle Networks

TL;DR

Viden is a voltage-based scheme that accurately identifies attacker ECUs in in-vehicle networks by constructing voltage profiles, enabling effective forensic and security measures with low false identification rates.

Contribution

Viden introduces a novel voltage-based method for pinpointing attacker ECUs, adapting to changing conditions and demonstrating practical deployability.

Findings

Achieves 0.2% false identification rate.

Works effectively on real vehicles and prototypes.

Accurately fingerprints ECUs using voltage measurements.

Abstract

Various defense schemes --- which determine the presence of an attack on the in-vehicle network --- have recently been proposed. However, they fail to identify which Electronic Control Unit (ECU) actually mounted the attack. Clearly, pinpointing the attacker ECU is essential for fast/efficient forensic, isolation, security patch, etc. To meet this need, we propose a novel scheme, called Viden (Voltage-based attacker identification), which can identify the attacker ECU by measuring and utilizing voltages on the in-vehicle network. The first phase of Viden, called ACK learning, determines whether or not the measured voltage signals really originate from the genuine message transmitter. Viden then exploits the voltage measurements to construct and update the transmitter ECUs' voltage profiles as their fingerprints. It finally uses the voltage profiles to identify the attacker ECU. Since Viden adapts its profiles to changes inside/outside of the vehicle, it can pinpoint the attacker ECU under various conditions. Moreover, its efficiency and design-compliance with modern in-vehicle network implementations make Viden practical and easily deployable. Our extensive experimental evaluations on both a CAN bus prototype and two real vehicles have shown that Viden can accurately fingerprint ECUs based solely on voltage measurements and thus identify the attacker ECU with a low false identification rate of 0.2%.