CANNON: Reliable and Stealthy Remote Shutdown Attacks via Unaltered Automotive Microcontrollers

Abstract

Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in modern vehicles have recently been targets for shutdown attacks, which can disable safety-critical vehicle functions and be used as means to launch more dangerous attacks. Existing attacks operate either by physical manipulation of the bus signals or message injection. However, we argue that these cannot simultaneously be remote, stealthy, and reliable. For instance, message injection is detected by modern Intrusion Detection System (IDS) proposals and requires strict synchronization that cannot be realized remotely. In this work, we introduce a new class of attacks that leverage the peripheral clock gating feature in modern automotive microcontroller units (MCUs). By using this capability, a remote adversary with purely software control can reliably "freeze" the output of a compromised ECU to insert arbitrary bits at any time instance. Utilizing on this insight, we develop the CANnon attack for remote shutdown. Since the CANnon attack produces error patterns indistinguishable from natural errors and does not require message insertion, detecting it with current techniques is difficult. We demonstrate this attack on two automotive MCUs used in modern passenger vehicle ECUs. We discuss potential mitigation strategies and countermeasures for such attacks.