The demand for Automotive Ethernet networks is growing rapidly because of higher bandwidth data and safety-critical functions. Unexpected behavior or crashes of software on an ECU caused by malfunctioning NICs due to protocol violations, rare and hard to reproduce faults, are pain points engineers must deal with. Man-in-the-middle (MitM) testing enables access to low-level network traffic for real-time manipulation, logging and analysis. Using NI FPGA technology, engineers can inject faults, alter packets, and emulate realistic disturbances at the MAC layer (e. g. invalid FCS). This method allows validation of ECU behavior, improves robustness, reliability, and network performance in modern vehicles.

• Why corrupted Automotive Ethernet Frames are hidden troublemakers
• Why it is hard to create invalid Automotive Ethernet Frames
• How to enable logging of invalid Automotive Ethernet Frames as well as reproducible, low-level fault injection through FPGA technology