# State-of-the-Art Survey on In-Vehicle Network Communication (CAN-Bus) Security and Vulnerabilities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01725 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01725/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Deep Transfer Learning Based Intrusion Detection System for Electric Vehicular Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05172/) (2021)
- [Temporal Misalignment Attacks against Multimodal Perception in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09095/) (2025)
- [CARACAS: vehiCular ArchitectuRe for detAiled Can Attacks Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07125/) (2024)
- [ByCAN: Reverse Engineering Controller Area Network (CAN) Messages from Bit to Byte Level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09265/) (2024)
- [SDN-Based False Data Detection With Its Mitigation and Machine Learning Robustness for In-Vehicle Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06556/) (2025)
- [Assessing the Resilience of Automotive Intrusion Detection Systems to Adversarial Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10620/) (2025)
- [CAN We Trust Your Results? A Cross-Dataset Study of Automotive IDS Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30430/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Nowadays with the help of advanced technology, modern vehicles are not only made up of mechanical devices but also consist of highly complex electronic devices and connections to the outside world. There are around 70 Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in modern vehicle which are communicating with each other over the standard communication protocol known as Controller Area Network (CAN-Bus) that provides the communication rate up to 1Mbps. There are different types of in-vehicle network protocol and bus system namely Controlled Area Network (CAN), Local Interconnected Network (LIN), Media Oriented System Transport (MOST), and FlexRay. Even though CAN-Bus is considered as de-facto standard for in-vehicle network communication, it inherently lacks the fundamental security features by design like message authentication. This security limitation has paved the way for adversaries to penetrate into the vehicle network and do malicious activities which can pose a dangerous situation for both driver and passengers. In particular, nowadays vehicular networks are not only closed systems, but also they are open to different external interfaces namely Bluetooth, GPS, to the outside world. Therefore, it creates new opportunities for attackers to remotely take full control of the vehicle. The objective of this research is to survey the current limitations of CAN-Bus protocol in terms of secure communication and different solutions that researchers in the society of automotive have provided to overcome the CAN-Bus limitation on different layers.