A practical method for identifying ECUs using differential voltage

Modern vehicles are rapidly converging with information technology (IT) to improve their performance and the driver’s convenience. As autonomous vehicles and connected cars become more popular, software is increasingly added to vehicles, and connections with outside vehicles are also increasing. As a result, cyberattacks, which occur in the traditional IT environment, are rapidly appearing in the automotive environment. Therefore, various security measures have been studied and applied to protect drivers and pedestrians from cyberattacks. An intrusion-detection system (IDS) detects in-vehicle network attacks and is a representative security measure. However, the success of IDS systems is limited due to the low performance of in-vehicle systems and limitations of in-vehicle network protocols such as CAN (Controller-Area Network). In this study, we propose an enhanced authentication technique using a differential voltage uniquely assigned to each electronic control unit (ECU) as well as the CAN identifier. This technique uses hardware-based characteristics and can be implemented inexpensively with little change to existing systems. It can also detect attacks such as spoofing, replay, and impersonation, which are most frequently used in vehicle cyberattacks, without complex and expensive IDS.