ACSD researchers present RollCAN at the CSCS

On 17 October 2020, Jannis Hamborg from the Applied Cyber Security Darmstadt (ACSD) research group presented the paper "RollCAN - CAN-bus based RollJam-Attack" at the 2nd Cyber Security in CarS Workshop (CSCS), which is being held in conjunction with the 32nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Taipei. The paper shows how rolling code attacks can be transferred to the vehicle CAN bus and demonstrates both professional and low-cost implementations.

At the 2nd Cyber Security in CarS Workshop (CSCS), which is being organised as part of the 32nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Taipei, Jannis Hamborg from the Applied Cyber Security Darmstadt (ACSD) research group will present the paper "RollCAN - CAN-bus based RollJam-Attack", which was co-authored with Timm Lauser and Christoph Krauß, also from ACSD.

In the paper, the principle of the well-known wireless RollJam attack is transferred to in-vehicle networks: RollCAN enables an attacker with physical access to intercept, block and retransmit remote keyless entry (RKE) messages sent via the controller area network (CAN) bus. This allows unauthorised locking and unlocking of vehicle doors. The authors demonstrate the practicality of the attack using two implementations, one with professional automotive equipment and a low-cost variant based on a Raspberry Pi with CAN interface, and discuss possible countermeasures.

RollCAN illustrates how security vulnerabilities can be transferred from wireless interfaces to internal vehicle systems and emphasises the importance of a multi-layered security approach in the automotive sector, from message authentication to better physical access protection mechanisms. Participants of the CSCS workshop will get a detailed insight into the results and proposed protection measures in the presentation.

Link to the ACM Digital Library: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3736130.3762686

Literature reference: Jannis Hamborg, Timm Lauser, Christoph Krauß. RollCAN - CAN-bus based RollJam-Attack. In Proceedings of the 2nd Cyber Security in Cars Workshop (CSCS). ACM. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1145/3736130.3762686