Assessing the Resilience of Automotive Intrusion Detection Systems to Adversarial Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Longari, Stefano, Cerracchio, Paolo, Carminati, Michele, Zanero, Stefano
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Longari, Stefano
Cerracchio, Paolo
Carminati, Michele
Zanero, Stefano
author_facet Longari, Stefano
Cerracchio, Paolo
Carminati, Michele
Zanero, Stefano
contents The security of modern vehicles has become increasingly important, with the controller area network (CAN) bus serving as a critical communication backbone for various Electronic Control Units (ECUs). The absence of robust security measures in CAN, coupled with the increasing connectivity of vehicles, makes them susceptible to cyberattacks. While intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have been developed to counter such threats, they are not foolproof. Adversarial attacks, particularly evasion attacks, can manipulate inputs to bypass detection by IDSs. This paper extends our previous work by investigating the feasibility and impact of gradient-based adversarial attacks performed with different degrees of knowledge against automotive IDSs. We consider three scenarios: white-box (attacker with full system knowledge), grey-box (partial system knowledge), and the more realistic black-box (no knowledge of the IDS' internal workings or data). We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed attacks against state-of-the-art IDSs on two publicly available datasets. Additionally, we study effect of the adversarial perturbation on the attack impact and evaluate real-time feasibility by precomputing evasive payloads for timed injection based on bus traffic. Our results demonstrate that, besides attacks being challenging due to the automotive domain constraints, their effectiveness is strongly dependent on the dataset quality, the target IDS, and the attacker's degree of knowledge.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10620
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Assessing the Resilience of Automotive Intrusion Detection Systems to Adversarial Manipulation
Longari, Stefano
Cerracchio, Paolo
Carminati, Michele
Zanero, Stefano
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
The security of modern vehicles has become increasingly important, with the controller area network (CAN) bus serving as a critical communication backbone for various Electronic Control Units (ECUs). The absence of robust security measures in CAN, coupled with the increasing connectivity of vehicles, makes them susceptible to cyberattacks. While intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have been developed to counter such threats, they are not foolproof. Adversarial attacks, particularly evasion attacks, can manipulate inputs to bypass detection by IDSs. This paper extends our previous work by investigating the feasibility and impact of gradient-based adversarial attacks performed with different degrees of knowledge against automotive IDSs. We consider three scenarios: white-box (attacker with full system knowledge), grey-box (partial system knowledge), and the more realistic black-box (no knowledge of the IDS' internal workings or data). We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed attacks against state-of-the-art IDSs on two publicly available datasets. Additionally, we study effect of the adversarial perturbation on the attack impact and evaluate real-time feasibility by precomputing evasive payloads for timed injection based on bus traffic. Our results demonstrate that, besides attacks being challenging due to the automotive domain constraints, their effectiveness is strongly dependent on the dataset quality, the target IDS, and the attacker's degree of knowledge.
title Assessing the Resilience of Automotive Intrusion Detection Systems to Adversarial Manipulation
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10620