Driving with Sharks: Rethinking Connected Vehicles with Vehicle Cyber Security

In a public service announcement on March 17, 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) jointly with the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, released a warning over the increasing vulnerability of motor vehicles to remote exploits . Engine shutdown, disable brakes and door locks are few examples of the possible vehicle cyber security attacks. Modern cars grow into a new target for cyberattacks as they become increasingly connected. While driving on the road, sharks (i.e., hackers) only need to be within communication range of your vehicle to attack it. However, in some cases, they can hack into it while they are miles away. In this article, we aim to illuminate the latest vehicle cyber security threats including malware attacks, On-Board Diagnostic (OBD) vulnerabilities, and auto mobile apps threats. We illustrate the In-Vehicle network architecture and demonstrate the latest defending mechanisms that are designed to mitigate such threats

Resilient Shield: Reinforcing the Resilience of Vehicles Against Security Threats

Vehicles have become complex computer systems with multiple communication interfaces. In the future, vehicles will have even more connections to e.g., infrastructure, pedestrian smartphones, cloud, road-side-units and the Internet. External and physical interfaces, as well as internal communication buses have shown to have potential to be exploited for attack purposes. As a consequence, there is an increase in regulations which demand compliance with vehicle cyber resilience requirements. However, there is currently no clear guidance on how to comply with these regulations from a technical perspective.To address this issue, we have performed a comprehensive threat and risk analysis based on published attacks against vehicles from the past 10 years, from which we further derive necessary security and resilience techniques. The work is done using the SPMT methodology where we identify vital vehicle assets, threat actors, their motivations and objectives, and develop a comprehensive threat model. Moreover, we develop a comprehensive attack model by analyzing the identified threats and attacks. These attacks are filtered and categorized based on attack type, probability, and consequence criteria. Additionally, we perform an exhaustive mapping between asset, attack, threat actor, threat category, and required mitigation mechanism for each attack, resulting in a presentation of a secure and resilient vehicle design. Ultimately, we present the Resilient Shield a novel and imperative framework to justify and ensure security and resilience within the automotive domain

Vulnerability analysis in RF locking systems of vehicles in Bogotá, Colombia.

A car electronic security system aims to prevent its theft, the theft of its parts or of elements in its interior. Studying these systems allows identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities. Nowadays, there are different types of attacks on these systems to exploit their vulnerabilities, such as replay, relay, brute-force or jamming attacks, among others. In the last five years in Bogotá, Colombia, the average number of stolen vehicles was 3,073 per year. This research project proposes the detection of vulnerabilities in the security system of vehicles in this city. A sample of 43 vehicles of different brands sold and registered in the city is taken. The replay attack was executed, as well as a modification of the brute-force attack. Results show that most of the implemented security systems in Bogotá are susceptible of being successfully attacked through the proposed methods. The analysis done on the brute-force attack highlights a considerable reduction in time for unlocking the vehicle compared to the conventional attack in more vulnerable RKE systems. Replay attacks turn successful in great part of the sample and, furthermore, it is concluded that the unlocking key code can be generated from the locking one

Automotive firmware extraction and analysis techniques

An intricate network of embedded devices, called Electronic Control Units (ECUs), is responsible for the functionality of a modern vehicle. Every module processes a myriad of information and forwards it on to other nodes on the network, typically an automotive bus such as the Controller Area Network (CAN). Analysing embedded device software, and automotive in particular, brings many challenges. The analyst must, especially in the notoriously secretive automotive industry, first lift the ECU firmware from the hardware, which typically prevents unauthorised access. In this thesis, we address this problem in two ways: - We detail and bypass the access control mechanism used in diagnostic protocols in ECU firmware. Using existing diagnostic functionality, we present a generic technique to download code to RAM and execute it, without requiring physical access to the ECU. We propose a generic firmware readout framework on top of this, which only requires access to the CAN bus. - We analyse various embedded bootloaders and combine dynamic analysis with low-level hardware fault attacks, resulting in several fault-injection attacks which bypass on-chip readout protection. We then apply these firmware extraction techniques to acquire immobiliser firmware by two different manufacturers, from which we reverse engineer the DST80 cipher and present it in full detail here. Furthermore, we point out flaws in the key generation procedure, also recovered from the ECU firmware, leading to a full key recovery based on publicly readable transponder pages

Dismantling the AUT64 Automotive Cipher

AUT64 is a 64-bit automotive block cipher with a 120-bit secret key used in a number of security sensitive applications such as vehicle immobilization and remote keyless entry systems. In this paper, we present for the first time full details of AUT64 including a complete specification and analysis of the block cipher, the associated authentication protocol, and its implementation in a widely-used vehicle immobiliser system that we have reverse engineered. Secondly, we reveal a number of cryptographic weaknesses in the block cipher design. Finally, we study the concrete use of AUT64 in a real immobiliser system, and pinpoint severe weaknesses in the key diversification scheme employed by the vehicle manufacturer. We present two key-recovery attacks based on the cryptographic weaknesses that, combined with the implementation flaws, break both the 8 and 24 round configurations of AUT64. Our attack on eight rounds requires only 512 plaintext-ciphertext pairs and, in the worst case, just 237.3 offline encryptions. In most cases, the attack can be executed within milliseconds on a standard laptop. Our attack on 24 rounds requires 2 plaintext-ciphertext pairs and 248.3 encryptions to recover the 120-bit secret key in the worst case. We have strong indications that a large part of the key is kept constant across vehicles, which would enable an attack using a single communication with the transponder and negligible offline computation