Modern vehicles rely on a myriad of electronic control units (ECUs) interconnected via controller area networks (CANs) for critical operations. Despite their ubiquitous use and reliability, CANs are susceptible to sophisticated cyberattacks, particularly masquerade attacks, which inject false data that mimic legitimate messages at the expected frequency. These attacks pose severe risks such as unintended acceleration, brake deactivation, and rogue steering. Traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS) often struggle to detect these subtle intrusions due to their seamless integration into normal traffic. This paper introduces a novel framework for detecting masquerade attacks in the CAN bus using graph machine learning (ML). We hypothesize that the integration of shallow graph embeddings with time series features derived from CAN frames enhances the detection of masquerade attacks. We show that by representing CAN bus frames as message sequence graphs (MSGs) and enriching each node with contextual statistical attributes from time series, we can enhance detection capabilities across various attack patterns compared to using only graph-based features. Our method ensures a comprehensive and dynamic analysis of CAN frame interactions, improving robustness and efficiency. Extensive experiments on the ROAD dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating statistically significant improvements in the detection rates of masquerade attacks compared to a baseline that uses only graph-based features, as confirmed by Mann-Whitney U and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests (p < 0.05).

Vehicular controller area networks (CANs) are susceptible to masquerade attacks by malicious adversaries. In masquerade attacks, adversaries silence a targeted ID and then send malicious frames with forged content at the expected timing of benign frames. As masquerade attacks could seriously harm vehicle functionality and are the stealthiest attacks to detect in CAN, recent work has devoted attention to compare frameworks for detecting masquerade attacks in CAN. However, most existing works report offline evaluations using CAN logs already collected using simulations that do not comply with domain's real-time constraints. Here we contribute to advance the state of the art by introducing a benchmark study of four different non-deep learning (DL)-based unsupervised online intrusion detection systems (IDS) for masquerade attacks in CAN. Our approach differs from existing benchmarks in that we analyze the effect of controlling streaming data conditions in a sliding window setting. In doing so, we use realistic masquerade attacks being replayed from the ROAD dataset. We show that although benchmarked IDS are not effective at detecting every attack type, the method that relies on detecting changes at the hierarchical structure of clusters of time series produces the best results at the expense of higher computational overhead. We discuss limitations, open challenges, and how the benchmarked methods can be used for practical unsupervised online CAN IDS for masquerade attacks.

Although ubiquitous in modern vehicles, Controller Area Networks (CANs) lack basic security properties and are easily exploitable. A rapidly growing field of CAN security research has emerged that seeks to detect intrusions on CANs. Producing vehicular CAN data with a variety of intrusions is out of reach for most researchers as it requires expensive assets and expertise. To assist researchers, we present the first comprehensive guide to the existing open CAN intrusion datasets, including a quality analysis of each dataset and an enumeration of each's benefits, drawbacks, and suggested use case. Current public CAN IDS datasets are limited to real fabrication (simple message injection) attacks and simulated attacks often in synthetic data, which lack fidelity. In general, the physical effects of attacks on the vehicle are not verified in the available datasets. Only one dataset provides signal-translated data but not a corresponding raw binary version. Overall, the available data pigeon-holes CAN IDS works into testing on limited, often inappropriate data (usually with attacks that are too easily detectable to truly test the method), and this lack data has stymied comparability and reproducibility of results. As our primary contribution, we present the ROAD (Real ORNL Automotive Dynamometer) CAN Intrusion Dataset, consisting of over 3.5 hours of one vehicle's CAN data. ROAD contains ambient data recorded during a diverse set of activities, and attacks of increasing stealth with multiple variants and instances of real fuzzing, fabrication, and unique advanced attacks, as well as simulated masquerade attacks. To facilitate benchmarking CAN IDS methods that require signal-translated inputs, we also provide the signal time series format for many of the CAN captures. Our contributions aim to facilitate appropriate benchmarking and needed comparability in the CAN IDS field.

Modern vehicles rely on a fleet of electronic control units (ECUs) connected through controller area network (CAN) buses for critical vehicular control. With the expansion of advanced connectivity features in automobiles and the elevated risks of internal system exposure, the CAN bus is increasingly prone to intrusions and injection attacks. As ordinary injection attacks disrupt the typical timing properties of the CAN data stream, rule-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) can easily detect them. However, advanced attackers can inject false data to the signal/semantic level, while looking innocuous by the pattern/frequency of the CAN messages. The rule-based IDS, as well as the anomaly-based IDS, are built merely on the sequence of CAN messages IDs or just the binary payload data and are less effective in detecting such attacks. Therefore, to detect such intelligent attacks, we propose CANShield, a deep learning-based signal-level intrusion detection framework for the CAN bus. CANShield consists of three modules: a data preprocessing module that handles the high-dimensional CAN data stream at the signal level and parses them into time series suitable for a deep learning model; a data analyzer module consisting of multiple deep autoencoder (AE) networks, each analyzing the time-series data from a different temporal scale and granularity, and finally an attack detection module that uses an ensemble method to make the final decision. Evaluation results on two high-fidelity signal-based CAN attack datasets show the high accuracy and responsiveness of CANShield in detecting advanced intrusion attacks.