This complete guide introduces you to the world of automotive communication systems and security testing. You’ll begin by learning the foundations of communication protocols, exploring the differences between parallel and serial communication as they relate to modern vehicles. These concepts lay the groundwork for understanding how data flows through a car’s internal network.

The course then dives deep into the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol, the backbone of vehicle communication. You’ll study CAN basics, data frames, nodes, remote frames and how to send data across the CAN bus. With these lessons, you’ll gain the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to interact with and analyse in-vehicle networks.

You’ll also master the CAN-UTILS framework, a powerful toolset for working with CAN data. You’ll learn how to install CAN-UTILS, create virtual CAN interfaces, and use the available tools to send, receive and monitor CAN frames. The course then moves into using CAN-UTILS with a virtual car simulator, teaching you how to dump CAN frames, perform replay attacks, find CAN frames using recursive splitting or sniffing methods, and send exact frames with the cansend method—skills that are essential for both penetration testing and defensive security research.

Finally, you’ll move from the virtual environment to real-vehicle communication. Lessons cover the hardware required to communicate with a vehicle’s CAN bus, basics of Arduino, creating your own CAN communication device, uploading CAN-UTILS code to Arduino and connecting your device to a real vehicle. By the end of the course, you’ll be able to analyse, test and understand vehicle communications, laying a solid foundation for automotive security testing and research.