Poster: DP-Reverser: Automatically Reverse Engineering Vehicle Diagnostic Protocols

In-vehicle protocols are important for the security assessment and protection of modern vehicles since they are used in communicating with, accessing, and even manipulating ECUs (Electronic Control Units). Unfortunately, the majority of in-vehicle protocols are proprietary (i.e., without publicly available documents). Although recent studies proposed methods to reverse engineer the CAN protocol used in the communication among ECUs, they cannot be applied to vehicle diagnostics protocols, which have been widely exploited to launch remote attacks. Thus, we propose a novel framework for automatically reverse engineering the diagnostic protocols of vehicles by leveraging professional diagnostic tools. We design and develop a new cyber-physical system that uses a set of algorithms to control a programmable robotics arm with the aid of cameras to automatically trigger and capture the messages of diagnostics protocols as well as reverse engineer their formats, semantic meanings, and proprietary formulas required for processing the response messages. We perform a large-scale experiment to evaluate our prototype using 18 real vehicles.