As a graduation requirement for M.S. non-thesis, I wrote a scholarly paper which was reviewed and approved by two faculty members from the University of Maryland. The paper was to be “a concise summary of a few research papers published in the open literature.”
The topic of the paper was related to a research project that I had done in the Summer of 2016 and continued that Fall as part of an Independent Study, for which I received course credit. The paper produced as a result of that study will be included in my next post.
Below is the abstract of the scholarly paper:
Current automobiles exist in a nexus between the mechanical past and the digital future. Although cars were once purely mechanical, the modern driver now thinks of car actions and events through layers of abstraction, and may have little or no understanding of what actually occurs on the press of a pedal or the push of a button. The addition of new vehicle features to improve safety, efficiency and convenience requires the integration of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) into the vehicle, and as a result the driver has become more removed from the mechanics. This paper examines communication between those controllers through the Controller Area Network (CAN Bus) protocol, the current standard for in-vehicle communication. It goes on to summarize security vulnerabilities through the CAN bus that have been previously outlined and discussed in several white papers. Finally, the paper briefly discusses white papers on the future of automotive security as we transition into the era of autonomous vehicles.
Click here to download the full paper!