vProfile: Voltage-Based Anomaly Detection in Controller Area Networks
Nathan Liua, Carlos Morenob, Murray Dunnec and Sebastian Fischmeisterd
Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Waterloo Waterloo, Canada
andliu@uwaterloo.ca
bcmoreno@uwaterloo.ca
cmdunne@uwaterloo.ca
dsfischme@uwaterloo.ca
ABSTRACT
Modern cars are becoming more accessible targets for cyberattacks due to the proliferation of wireless communication channels. The intra-vehicle Controller Area Network (CAN) bus lacks authentication, which exposes critical components to interference from less secure, wirelessly compromised modules. To address this issue, we propose vProfile, a sender authentication system based on voltage fingerprints of Electronic Control Units (ECUs). vProfile exploits the physical properties of ECU output voltages on the CAN bus to determine the authenticity of bus messages, which enables the detection of both hijacked ECUs and external devices connected to the bus. We show the potential of vProfile using experiments on two production vehicles with precision and recall scores of over 99.99%. The improved identification rates and more straightforward design of vProfile make it an attractive improvement over existing methods.
Keywords: Anomaly Detection, Automotive, Controller Area Network (CAN), Intrusion Detection, Security, Side-Channel.
