Securing In-boat CAN Communication over the Internet

Abstract

Opening a communication channel to the internal vehicle bus of pleasure boats through the Internet, offers benefits such as remote diagnostics and software update of boat components. An undesirable consequence of this communication is a broad range of security threats which could can damage to the boat and company. Therefore, it is important that the communication channel is secured and these threats are mitigated. In this report, we show that it is possible to create a secure communication channel to the internal bus of a pleasure boat with an inexpensive embedded device. The solution is based on knowledge from the automotive and embedded device sector, and possible ways for protecting against these threats have been analyzed. A solution has been tested with an embedded device having access to the internal bus and connection to the Internet using a smartphone, while maintaining confidentiality, integrity and authenticity. The final results show that it is possible to create the communication channel with this inexpensive embedded device. The communication between the device and the server is secured with Transport Layer Security with sufficient throughput for various tasks. In addition to this, the embedded device need no manual input except for configuration of the smartphone. In essence, this thesis offers a proof-of-concept for an inexpensive way to improve customer support.