CANvas: Fast and Inexpensive Automotive Network Mapping


Sekar Kulandaivel, Tushar Goyal, Arnav Kumar Agrawal, and Vyas Sekar, Carnegie Mellon University


Modern vehicles contain tens of Electronic Control Units (ECUs), several of which communicate over the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol. As such, in-vehicle networks have become a prime target for automotive network attacks. To understand the security of these networks, we argue that we need tools analogous to network mappers for traditional networks that provide an in-depth understanding of a network's structure. To this end, our goal is to develop an automotive network mapping tool that assists in identifying a vehicle's ECUs and their communication with each other. A significant challenge in designing this tool is the broadcast nature of the CAN protocol, as network messages contain no information about their sender or recipients. To address this challenge, we design and implement CANvas, an automotive network mapper that identifies transmitting ECUs with a pairwise clock offset tracking algorithm and identifies receiving ECUs with a forced ECU isolation technique. CANvas generates network maps in under an hour that identify a previously unknown ECU in a 2009 Toyota Prius and identify lenient message filters in a 2017 Ford Focus.

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@inproceedings {236264,
author = {Sekar Kulandaivel and Tushar Goyal and Arnav Kumar Agrawal and Vyas Sekar},
title = {CANvas: Fast and Inexpensive Automotive Network Mapping},
year = {2019},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {389--405},
url = {},
publisher = {{USENIX} Association},
month = aug,

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