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Combinatorial Testing Methods for Reverse Engineering Undocumented CAN Bus Functionality

Published: 30 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Modern vehicles such as cars, ships, and planes are increasingly managed using Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that communicate over a Controller Area Network (CAN) bus. While this approach offers enhanced functionality, efficiency, and robustness, it may also be used for unforeseen or malicious purposes ranging from aftermarket modifications to full-fledged attacks threatening passengers’ safety. The ability to conduct in-depth tests is thus vital to protect against these issues. However, much of the functionality of ECUs is proprietary or undocumented. To alleviate this obstacle, this work presents a reverse engineering approach using high-coverage test sets produced using Combinatorial Testing (CT) methods. Our results indicate that this technique is promising for exciting unknown functionality, although challenges regarding the presence of hidden state and high-accuracy oracles are yet to be overcome.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ARES '24: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
July 2024
2032 pages
ISBN:9798400717185
DOI:10.1145/3664476
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 30 July 2024

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  • Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft

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ARES 2024

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