Security Challenges and Mitigation Strategies for CAN-Based Protocols: A Comprehensive Survey

The Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol is the backbone of many critical communication systems in automotive, industrial, and embedded applications. Despite its widespread adoption, CAN-based protocols, such as J1939, CANopen, NMEA 2000, and others, face inherent security vulnerabilities due to their lack of robust authentication and encryption mechanisms. This research examines the security challenges associated with CAN and its derivative protocols, focusing on potential exploits such as message spoofing, eavesdropping, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and unauthorized data access. Unlike previous studies, this work comprehensively reviews defense strategies, techniques, and countermeasures across multiple CAN-based protocols, aiming to identify all possible security solutions in a unified analysis. In addition, it evaluates current industry solutions, including encryption overlays, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and protocol enhancements, while considering trade-offs between security and performance metrics, such as network traffic load, latency, and scalability. By analyzing existing approaches, this research identifies gaps in current implementations and explores innovative strategies to enhance security while maintaining network efficiency. The findings contribute to developing more resilient communication frameworks in CAN networks.