Security Modeling and Analysis on Intra Vehicular Network

Controller Area Network (CAN), the de facto standard in-vehicle network protocol, prompts modern automobile an integrated system that achieves real-time interactions with roads, vehicles and people. Yet such connectivity makes it feasible to illegally access, or even attack the CAN, causing not only privacy disclosure, property damage, but also life threat. In this paper, we analyze intrinsic weakness in CAN protocol that is mostly exploited by attackers and comprehensively survey the existing attacks based on CAN interfaces. Furthermore, we propose an attack evaluation system based on attack tree model and Markov chain to assess the probability of compromising CAN and the steady state of CAN system at the presence of these attacks. Finally, we simulate new steady state when altering the difficulty of a certain attack and the results demonstrate that sometimes improving defense of an attack declines the security level of the entire system instead.