Rakesh Elamaran
Rakesh Elamaran is a passionate Security Engineer with a love for breaking things responsibly and apparently his dissertation doing the same to virtual cars. He holds an MSc in Cyber Security Engineering from the University of Warwick, is a Licensed Penetration Tester, and founder of Rootecstak, a cybersecurity community for the next generation of security professionals.
His current obsession is offensive security and red teaming, which probably explains why he enjoyed the attack simulation part of his dissertation a little too much.
BSides Exeter 2026 marks his first international conference talk and he is here to find out if anyone else wants to know what happens when you try to hack a car's brain.
Session
Imagine your car's brakes stop responding. Not because of a mechanical fault, but because a security system is drowning out the signal. That is not science fiction. It is what can happen when intrusion detection goes wrong inside a real-time vehicle network built for speed, not security.
While researching for my MSc dissertation, I simulated five attacks against a virtual CAN bus. Some were loud and obvious. Others slipped through silently, exactly as a real attacker would intend.
But detecting the attacks was not the hardest part. Doing it without destabilising the same safety-critical systems I was protecting turned out to be. Rule-based detection missed the quiet ones. Machine learning flagged too much. A hybrid approach combining both was the only method that handled the full range reliably.
This talk explores what actually happens when security meets a moving car, and why detecting attacks is meaningless if the defence itself becomes the risk. Attendees will leave with a clearer picture of what it actually takes to defend a vehicle network responsibly.