Search Results

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.

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.