arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Digital Twin-Based Intrusion Detection for Vehicle Powertrain CAN Bus Systems

The paper presents a digital‑twin (DT) based intrusion detection system (IDS) for vehicle powertrain CAN bus traffic, modeling physical relationships among decoded signals to detect payload‑manipulation attacks that preserve normal timing and sequencing. Using a shared‑encoder LSTM trained on 17 Hyundai/Kia CAN signals, the DT flags anomalies when residuals exceed a threshold, achieving high detection rates (up to 94.6%) for stealthy attacks such as continuous drift and masquerade, while a range‑and‑plausibility baseline fails to detect them. The study demonstrates that learning coupled vehicle dynamics enables detection of payload‑level attacks that evade traditional timing‑based IDSs, though false positives remain a challenge.

By Araf Rahman, M Sabbir Salek, Mashrur Chowdhury