Modern vehicles are increasingly connected — to each other, to roadside infrastructure, and to the cloud — while running hundreds of electronic control units (ECUs) communicating over the Controller Area Network (CAN bus). This creates a large and largely unprotected attack surface: CAN bus has no built-in authentication or encryption, and a compromised ECU can issue commands to brakes, steering, and engine systems.
The NGIN Lab’s vehicular security research addresses two complementary problems:
In-vehicle security:
- Analyzing CAN bus traffic to detect anomalous or spoofed messages
- Designing moving target defense protocols (DAVA) that randomize CAN IDs to prevent replay attacks
- Using Named Data Networking for secure in-vehicle communication with built-in content authentication
Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) security:
- Applying NDN’s name-based security model to vehicular networking
- Designing secure mobility planes for V2X communication
- Formal security analysis of vehicular network architectures
This work is done in collaboration with Christos Papadopoulos (CSU), Fadi Mohsen, Usman Rauf, and Micah Jones.
Code: github.com/tntech-ngin