Embedded Security for Vehicles : ECU Hacking
Siddharth Shukla · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2016
A modern automotive vehicle is a complex technical system, containing many electronic, mechanical, and software parts. Typically, a vehicle contain 70 or more ECU's (Electronic Control Units) on an average controlling a large number of distributed functions, of which many are safety-critical like ABS control, Transmission Control, Engine Control and Body Control etc. So if there are possible attacks on the ECU then this could be even more dangerous than the web attacks as these involve the risk of life. The project involves vulnerability analysis of ECU with Tricore microcontroller to understand any security weaknesses and attacks are created to exploit those weaknesses. A service with potential vulnerabilities is implemented on the ECU and attacks to exploit such vulnerabilities are demonstrated. The Tricore architecture is analyzed to find what types of attacks are possible, what the desired targets are and how attacks could be performed over the CAN network. The result of the project is a working example of an exploitable application running on an ECU and microcontroller.