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Maintaining and diagnosing vehicle systems often involves a technician connecting a service computer to the vehicle diagnostic port through a vehicle diagnostics adapter (VDA). This creates a connection from the service software to the vehicle network through a protocol adapter. Often, the protocols for the personal computer (PC) hosted diagnostic programs use USB, and the diagnostic port provides access to the controller area network (CAN). However, the PC can also communicate to the VDA via WiFi or Bluetooth. There may be scenarios where these wireless interfaces are not appropriate, such as maintaining military vehicles. As such, a method to defeature the wireless capabilities of a typical vehicle diagnostic adapter is demonstrated without access to the source code or modifying the hardware. The process of understanding the vehicle diagnostic adapter system, its hardware components, the firmware for the main processor and subsystems, and the update mechanism is explored.

Autonomous truck and trailer configurations face challenges when operating in reverse due to the lack of sensing on the trailer. It is anticipated that sensor packages will be installed on existing trailers to extend autonomous operations while operating in reverse in uncontrolled environments, like a customer's loading dock. Power Line Communication (PLC) between the trailer and the tractor cannot support high bandwidth and low latency communication. This paper explores the impact of using Ethernet or a wireless medium for commercial trailer-tractor communication on the lifecycle and operation of trailer electronic control units (ECUs) from a Systems Engineering perspective to address system requirements, integration, and security. Additionally, content-based and host-based networking approaches for in-vehicle communication, such as Named Data Networking (NDN) and IP-based networking are compared.

First responders and traffic crash investigators collect and secure evidence necessary to determine the cause of a crash. As vehicles with advanced autonomous features become more common on the road, inevitably they will be involved in such incidents. Thus, traditional data collection requirements may need to be augmented to accommodate autonomous technology and the connectivity associated with autonomous and semi-autonomous driving features. The objective of this paper is to understand the data from a fielded autonomous system and to motivate the development of requirements for autonomous vehicle data collection. The issue of data ownership and access will be discussed. Additional complicating factors, such as cybersecurity concerns combined with a first responder’s legal authority, may pose challenges for traditional data collection.

Practical encryption is an important tool in improving the cybersecurity posture of vehicle data loggers and engineering tools. However, low-cost embedded systems struggle with reliably capturing and encrypting all frames on the vehicle networks. In this paper, implementations of symmetric and asymmetric algorithms were used to perform envelope encryption of session keys with symmetric encryption algorithms while logging vehicle controller area network (CAN) traffic. Maintaining determinism and minimizing latency are primary considerations when implementing cryptographic solutions in an embedded system. To satisfy the timing requirements for vehicle systems, the memory-mapped Cryptographic Acceleration Unit (mmCAU) on the NXP K66 processor enabled 6.4Mb/sec symmetric encryption rates, which enables logging of multiple channels at 100% bus load. Using AES-128 in Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode provides the encryption for data confidentiality.

Vehicles using controller area networks (CANs) for on-board device communications may have event data recorders (EDRs) that either capture or reflect network feeds from an array of sensors and other electronic control units. Using the data recorded in an EDR for investigative purposes requires external verification of accuracy. However, conducting external tests that set events can be expensive due to the time and equipment involved. This paper proposes a practical verification method that uses CAN bus monitoring tools to compare vehicle network traffic to external measurements. The premise of this work is that data reliability from an EDR can be determined if the reliability of the network data source for the EDR can be determined. Once the reliability of the source is determined, the reliability of the event data can be quantified based on effects of truncation and sampling.

Cyber assurance of heavy trucks is a major concern with new designs as well as with supporting legacy systems. Many cyber security experts and analysts are used to working with traditional information technology (IT) networks and are familiar with a set of technologies that may not be directly useful in the commercial vehicle sector. To help connect security researchers to heavy trucks, a remotely accessible testbed has been prototyped for experimentation with security methodologies and techniques to evaluate and improve on existing technologies, as well as developing domain-specific technologies. The testbed relies on embedded Linux-based node controllers that can simulate the sensor inputs to various heavy vehicle electronic control units (ECUs). The node controller also monitors and affects the flow of network information between the ECUs and the vehicle communications backbone.

The lack of inherent security controls makes traditional Controller Area Network (CAN) buses vulnerable to Machine-In-The-Middle (MitM) cybersecurity attacks. Conventional vehicular MitM attacks involve tampering with the hardware to directly manipulate CAN bus traffic. We show, however, that MitM attacks can be realized without direct tampering of any CAN hardware. Our demonstration leverages how diagnostic applications based on RP1210 are vulnerable to Machine-In-The-Middle attacks. Test results show SAE J1939 communications, including single frame and multi-framed broadcast and on-request messages, are susceptible to data manipulation attacks where a shim DLL is used as a Machine-In-The-Middle. The demonstration shows these attacks can manipulate data that may mislead vehicle operators into taking the wrong actions.