A Comprehensive Review on CAN Protocol Security: Current Trends and Future Directions

ABSTRACT

The controller area network (CAN) is a core component of the communication systems in industrial, vehicle and embedded applications, which connects the electronic components and allows them to communicate between several electronic control units (ECU). However, the absence of inherent safety measures makes the CAN susceptible to cyber‐attacks. Therefore, the CAN is safeguarded by mitigating and detecting potential attacks through some mechanisms, like authentication and intrusion detection systems (IDS). Hence, this review article presents a comprehensive analysis of the current 65 research articles on the concept of secure CAN protocol and the current methods are categorized based on authentication strategies and IDS. Based on this category, the key findings of this research show that the hash‐based models provide better results in authentication mechanisms and DL‐based strategies are effective in IDS ensuring robust and reliable detection of attacks in the CAN bus system. Moreover, this research identifies the research gap in current methods by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, which offers valuable information for scholars and experts in designing a reliable and robust IDS for CAN with increased performance to mitigate and detect cyber‐attacks. Additionally, future work could be designing an authentication mechanism with the consensus‐based blockchain framework to increase the security of CAN against cyber threats.