A Convolutional Encoder Network for Intrusion Detection in Controller Area Networks

Integrated with various electronic control units (ECUs), vehicles are becoming more intelligent with the assistance of essential connections. However, the interaction with the outside world raises great concerns on cyber-attacks. As a main standard for in-vehicle network, Controller Area Network (CAN) does not have any built-in security mechanisms to guarantee a secure communication. This increases risks of denial of service, remote control attacks by an attacker, posing serious threats to underlying vehicles, property and human lives. As a result, it is urgent to develop an effective in-vehicle network intrusion detection system (IDS) for better security. In this paper, we propose a Feature-based Sliding Window (FSW) to extract the feature of CAN Data Field and CAN IDs. Then we construct a convolutional encoder network (CEN) to detect network intrusion of CAN networks. The proposed FSW-CEN method is evaluated on real-world datasets. The experimental results show that compared to traditional data processing methods and convolutional neural networks, our method is able to detect attacks with a higher accuracy in terms of detection accuracy and false negative rate.