MIDS: Detecting Stealthy Masquerade and Tampering Attacks on CAN Bus via Bidirectional Mamba

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 17 Jun 2026] MIDS: Detecting Stealthy Masquerade and Tampering Attacks on CAN Bus via Bidirectional Mamba Qiqi Liu, Runhan Song, Lei Cui, Heng Zhang, Yuyan Sun, Limin Sun The Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol is the primary communication standard for Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in modern vehicles, but its lack of encryption and authentication exposes it to a range of security threats. Existing intrusion detection systems are largely tuned to fabrication-style attacks (DoS, fuzzing, ID spoofing realised by frame injection), in which detection signals such as per-ID inter-arrival statistics are readily available. We instead address the harder \emph{masquerade} setting~\cite{b37}, in which an internal adversary substitutes a legitimate frame in-situ at its original transmission slot, preserving traffic periodicity and rendering traffic-statistic defences ineffective. We propose the Mamba Intrusion Detection System (MIDS), an innovative dual-stream framework that processes CAN identifiers and payloads in parallel and reconstructs their joint temporal semantics through bidirectional selective state-space modelling. To evaluate MIDS, we collected over 100 million CAN frames from a physical Tesla Model 3 across three driving regimes and synthesised 54 masquerade attack variants spanning ID-only, data-only, and combined modifications. MIDS attains an F1 of 96.94\% on this dataset, exceeding the strongest reproducible baseline by more than 8 percentage points, while sustaining a 1.147~ms single-window inference latency -- ample headroom for real-time onboard deployment. To verify generalisation, we further evaluate MIDS on four public benchmarks (ROAD, CrySyS, OTIDS, CT\&T) covering both masquerade and injection scenarios; MIDS attains F1 from 93.70\% to 99.61\%, outperforming the strongest of eight reproduced baselines by up to 13.94 percentage points under a unified 5-fold protocol. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.18599 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.18599v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.18599 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Qiqi Liu [view email] [v1] Wed, 17 Jun 2026 01:57:08 UTC (9,744 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)