The advanced electronic units with wireless capabilities inside modern vehicles have, enhanced the driving experience, but also introduced a myriad of security problems due to the inherent limitations of the internal communication protocol. In the last two decades, a number of security threats have been identified and accordingly, security measures have been proposed. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of security threats and countermeasures for the ubiquitous CAN bus communication protocol. Our review of the existing literature leads us to a observation of an overlooked simple, cost-effective, and incrementally deployable solution. Essentially, a reverse firewall, referred to in this paper as an icewall, can be an effective defense against a major class of packet-injection attacks and many denial of service attacks. We cover the fundamentals of the icewall in this paper. Further, by introducing the notion of human-in-the-loop, we discuss the subtle implications to its security when a human driver is accounted for.
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