Counter Attack Against the Bus-Off Attack on CAN

Abstract

The computerization of vehicles has accelerated and in-vehicle networks connect to external networks. Along with this, cyber security of vehicles becomes a problem. A bus-off attack was proposed by Cho et al. in 2016. The bus-off attack is a kind of denial of service (DoS) attacks. An attacker exploits the error handling function of Control Area Network (CAN) and puts a node into the bus off state in which it cannot transmit/receive any messages. The existing CAN security technology cannot prevent the bus-off attack. In 2018, Soma et al. proposed a counter attack as a countermeasure. However, they showed that the success rate of their counter attack is as low as about 30%, which is not enough as a countermeasure against a bus-off attack. In this paper, we propose a novel counter attack. In order to increase the success rate of the bus-off attack, attackers need to inject the preceding frame. We removed attackers from CAN bus by a bus-off attack to the preceding frame. And we have implemented our counter attack and showed its effectiveness as a countermeasure against the bus-off attack.