A Lightweight Sender Identification Scheme Based on Vehicle Physical Layer Characteristics

With emerging technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies widely used in intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs), users can obtain more personalized service and more comfortable experiences. Although these technologies significantly facilitate our quality of life, they also bring a series of vulnerable interfaces, which threaten the security of in-vehicle networks, such as the controller area network (CAN) bus. Therefore, many researchers design intrusion detection systems (IDSs) to detect malicious frames. However, most IDSs cannot locate the sender electronic control unit (ECU) of the malicious frames, the compromised ECU. This means vehicles cannot take timely defensive measures against the ECU, which seriously endangers the safety of users. In order to identify the sender more accurately, we design a lightweight sender identification scheme based on the physical layer characteristics of vehicles. It does not increase the load and calculation burden of the CAN bus, and it can accurately map multiple identifiers (IDs) to each ECU without developer documentation. When compromised ECUs send malicious frames to attack vehicles by spoofing or masquerading, the scheme is able to accurately identify the sender, with an average accuracy rate of over 95%.