Let Us Simulate A Car

As modern vehicles evolve into hyper-connected cyber-physical systems, the attack surface of their underlying digital control systems and automotive networks has expanded dramatically. However, conducting robust cybersecurity research on physical vehicles remains prohibitively expensive, physically hazardous, and difficult to scale. This talk is going to delve into how automotive digital systems work, and how one can build a basic simulation tool from ground up, synthesize realistic in-vehicle network traffic and emulate hardware logic to create an accessible testbed.

Outline:

1. Introduction to digital control units in car (ECU, TCU, BCM etc.)
2. Introduction to Controller Area Network (CAN)
3. Communication between control units
4. Simulating a bare-bones CANBus on Linux
5. Writing own CANBus simulator
6. Simulating control traffic on CANBus
7. Unified Diagnostic Services (UDS)
8. Writing own UDS server
9. Database CAN (DBC)
10. Simulating arbitrary car
11. Tying everything together