About Us

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Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is used extensively in vehicles today, including in heavy trucks – and military vehicles, using the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) J1939 standard for connecting electronic control units (ECUs). However, CAN was designed 30 years before security was an issue and now requires special protection.

A compromised CAN bus can make a vehicle misfunction, either causing mechanical equipment to misbehave or to simply bring a vehicle to a halt and prevent it from moving (for example, if the engine management ECU is bricked then the engine will simply stop until the vehicle is repaired).

There are several types of security threats to CAN bus, which include physical attacks (i.e. direct access to the CAN bus wires) and endpoint attacks (i.e. compromised ECUs).  This greater risk comes from compromised ECUs because these attacks can take place remotely. There are many ways to compromise an ECU, varying from a supply-chain attack to an attack via a vehicle’s radio links including Bluetooth and WiFi. For example, there has been successful research on spoofing tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) sensor messages to take control of the TPMS ECU. Once an ECU is compromised it can do many things:

• It can impersonate other ECUs by sending messages as if from them (called a “spoof attack”).  
• It can stop the bus from operating properly (e.g. flooding it with messages to slow it down).
• It can knock other ECUs offline by exploiting features of the CAN protocol.  
• It can emulate diagnostic tester equipment and erase the memory of ECUs to ‘brick’ them.

There are three properties of a secure system called the ‘CIA Triad’:

• Confidentiality: The message contents are secret
• Integrity: The message is genuine
• Availability: The system will continue to work

At Canis Labs, we have created specific protections for the CAN bus to address all three of these vulnerabilities

Our major technologies designed to address and prevent these threats from jeopardizing the integrity of the CAN bus and ensure proper operation of vehicles are:

- Cryptographic protection

- Hardware protection