CAN Bus Intrusion Detection Based on Auxiliary Classifier GAN and Out-of-distribution Detection

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is a ubiquitous bus protocol present in the Electrical/Electronic (E/E) systems of almost all vehicles. It is vulnerable to a range of attacks once the attacker gains access to the bus through the vehicle's attack surface. We address the problem of Intrusion Detection on the CAN bus and present a series of methods based on two classifiers trained with Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (ACGAN) to detect and assign fine-grained labels to Known Attacks and also detect the Unknown Attack class in a dataset containing a mixture of (Normal + Known Attacks + Unknown Attack) messages. The most effective method is a cascaded two-stage classification architecture, with the multi-class Auxiliary Classifier in the first stage for classification of Normal and Known Attacks, passing Out-of-Distribution (OOD) samples to the binary Real-Fake Classifier in the second stage for detection of the Unknown Attack class. Performance evaluation demonstrates that our method achieves both high classification accuracy and low runtime overhead, making it suitable for deployment in the resource-constrained in-vehicle environment.