A language for advanced protocol analysis in automotive networks

Abstract

The increased use and interconnection of electronic components in automobiles has made communication behavior in automotive networks drastically more complex. Both communication designs at application level and complex communication scenarios are often under-specified or out of scope of existing analysis techniques. We extend traditional protocol analyzers in order to capture communication at the level of abstraction that reflects application design and show that the same technique can be used to specify, monitor and test complex scenarios. We present CFR (Channel Filter Rule) models, a novel approach for the specification of analyzers and a domain-specific language that implements this approach. From CFR models, we can fully generate powerful analyzers that extract design intentions, abstract protocol layers and even complex scenarios from low level communication data. We show that three basic concepts (channels, filters and rules) are sufficient to build such powerful analyzers and identify possible areas of application.