Voltage Based Authentication for Controller Area Networks with Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Controller area networks (CANs) are vulnerable to spoofing attacks such as frame falsifying attacks, as electronic control units (ECUs) send and receive messages without any authentication and encryption. In this paper, we propose a physical authentication scheme that exploits the voltage features of the ECU signals on the CAN bus and applies reinforcement learning to choose the authentication mode such as the protection level and test threshold. This scheme enables a monitor node to optimize the authentication mode via trial-and-error without knowing the CAN bus signal model and spoofing model. Experimental results show that the proposed authentication scheme can significantly improve the authentication accuracy and response compared with a benchmark scheme.