Few days ago I had a small talk (on our local Defcon group meeting - DC#7812) regarding CAN (Controller Area Network) and ECU analysis with help of CANToolz framework. Therefore, here I would like to repeat some of the ideas from that talk, give some explanations about "Why I have created Yet Another CAN Hacking Tool" and what are my goals.
Here you can find original slides -
Intro
Automotive Security is an extremely hot-topic now, and that is why I am interested in this field and very lucky to be a part of this automotive industry. Actually, this topic is HUGE: many of the technologies, big attack surface and blah blah blah….
However, security of vehicle's local network has been the main topic for last few years. Yes, I am talking about CAN bus and this is a good moment to remind an awesome research done by Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek: http://illmatics.com/car_hacking.pdf. I am not going to talk about CAN security in general since this is well-known thing (but highly important!).
When I have started my own “actions in this field”, I met one big issue - lack of tools that can help me to do what I want. Actually, in the Internet you can find many different tools for working with CAN bus. These tools are quite good and helpful, but if you want to use them "together", perform a MitM or make something more, then you have to "customize" them. It is good if you have one car... but what is if you have more targets to test?
Finally, I came into a conclusion that I need to have one common framework where I can work with CAN bus and ECU devices together with minimum "code-writings". If you are familiar with such kind of tools like BurpSuite or MetaSploit then you will understand my words. I wanted such kind of tool as it is going to make my work easier in case if I will share results with someone else or work in a team. Thus, my aim was to have module-based framework that can perform MitM (or work with more than one bus), will be hardware independent and have one-standard interface and even GUI. One more important thing I wanted to have is an open-source project – when all people together will have access to more vehicles than bunch of researchers. I think, together we can create more useful modules that can be used by testers, vendors (in an ideal world) and enthusiasts all over the world.
