The Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is a foundational communication protocol widely adopted in automotive and industrial systems for seamless control unit connectivity. Valued for its reliability and cost-efficiency, CAN is essential to modern vehicle and machinery operation.

However, the original CAN protocol lacks inherent security features, exposing systems to significant cyber risks. Messages transmitted over CAN can be intercepted, manipulated, or spoofed, leading to potentially dangerous operational disruptions. The absence of native support for message authentication, data integrity, and confidentiality makes CAN networks vulnerable to attacks such as message injection, replay attacks, and data tampering.

CAN Security Challenges

• No Sender Authentication: No mechanism to verify the sender’s identity. An attacker can inject arbitrary messages.
• No Data Integrity Verification: Altered messages go undetected, compromising system reliability.
• Vulnerability to Replay Attacks: Attackers can capture and replay legitimate messages, triggering unauthorized actions.
• Lack of Confidentiality: Data is transmitted in clear text, allowing sensitive information to be easily intercepted

Automotive Solutions for Secure CAN

To safeguard CAN communications, iWave integrates cutting-edge security mechanisms designed to protect automotive and industrial applications

• Message Authentication Codes (MACs)
  • Where each CAN message is appended with an authentication code/tag generated using a secret key.
  • This hence authorizes that the message is generated by an authentic node/ECU (one that possess the secret key).
• Encryption of CAN data
  • Encryption provides confidentiality by ensuring that only authorized parties can read the content of the message. By authorized parties means the devices/nodes that has the shared secret key.
• Spoofing and Tamper protection
  • The device can be made to configure with the transmit passlist (or whitelisting of CAN IDs) and receive blocklist (or blacklisting of CAN IDs).
  • This enables only the messages with accepted IDs (decided by the source/internally) are received and transmitted by the node/device.
• Flooding Protection
  • This mechanism is used to detect if the other connected node is attempting to flood the bus with excessive messages thereby preventing the transfer of the actual important messages.
• Replay Attack Protection
  • This protection could be achieved by making use of Freshness Value counter which gets incremented for each transferred CAN data, thereby keeping track of the freshness of the message.

Architecture of Secure CAN module