LSTM-Based Intrusion Detection System for In-Vehicle Can Bus Communications

The modern automobile is a complex piece of technology that uses the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus system as a central system for managing the communication between the electronic control units (ECUs). Despite its central importance, the CAN bus system does not support authentication and authorization mechanisms, i.e., CAN messages are broadcast without basic security features. As a result, it is easy for attackers to launch attacks at the CAN bus network system. Attackers can compromise the CAN bus system in several ways including Denial of Service (DoS), Fuzzing and Spoofing attacks. It is imperative to devise methodologies to protect modern cars against the aforementioned attacks. In this paper, we propose a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to detect and mitigate the CAN bus network attacks. We generate our own dataset by first extracting attack-free data from our experimental car and by injecting attacks into the latter and collecting the dataset. We use the dataset for testing and training our model. With our selected hyper-parameter values, our results demonstrate that our classifier is efficient in detecting the CAN bus network attacks, we achieved an overall detection accuracy of 99.995%. We also compare the proposed LSTM method with the Survival Analysis for automobile IDS dataset which is developed by the Hacking and Countermeasure Research Lab, Korea. Our proposed LSTM model achieves a higher detection rate than the Survival Analysis method.