UDS Attack Taxonomy: Systematic Classification of Vehicle Diagnostic Threats

The increasing complexity and connectivity of mod-ern vehicles have introduced significant security challenges. This also applies to the Unified Diagnostic Services (UDS) protocol, a communication standard used in the automotive industry for diagnostic and maintenance purposes. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of potential attack techniques targeting the UDS protocol. Leveraging the automotive-specific VATT&EK framework (a vehicle-specialized adaptation of the MITRE ATT&CK methodology), we systematically identify and categorize adversarial techniques for exploiting UDS vulnerabilities. Our analysis demonstrates the practical applicability of the resulting taxonomy by mapping it to existing attack scenarios from pub-lished literature, showing concrete examples for nearly two-thirds of the identified techniques. The presented taxonomy provides a structured approach for security assessments, incident response, and the development of security monitoring strategies for UDS, thus addressing critical cybersecurity challenges in modern connected vehicles. The work offers enhanced coverage beyond the commonly focused Security Access service, providing a more holistic understanding of poten-tial end-to-end attack scenarios and showcasing the adaptability of the VATT&EK (and in a broader sense also the MITRE ATT &CK) framework to the automotive domain.