The Vehicle May Be Sick: Denial of Diagnostic Services by Exploiting the CAN Transport Protocol

Vehicle diagnostics has become essential for detecting in-vehicle errors and ensuring safety. While the Unified Diagnostic Services (UDS) protocol is widely adopted for diagnostic operations, it relies on the ISO 15765-2 standard as the transport protocol over the Controller Area Network (CAN), which was designed without inherent security considerations. In this paper, we identify eight novel attack scenarios that exploit specific transport layer mechanisms in the ISO 15765-2 standard, including Flow Control manipulation, Sequence Number violations, and error handling abuses. We evaluate these attacks on a real passenger vehicle using two distinct diagnostic tools to demonstrate their practical impact. Our results confirm that three of these attack scenarios successfully induce denial of diagnostic services, leading to abnormal diagnostic results such as concealed faults and manipulated sensor readings. These findings highlight critical vulnerabilities that can deceive technicians and drivers, potentially exposing vehicles to significant safety risks.