Experiences from Implementing the ETSI ITS SecuredMessage Service

• Cooperative intelligent transport systems supportingsecure vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructurecommunications, is becoming a very important topic. The aimof this paper is to share our experiences from implementingthe ETSI Intelligent Transport System (ITS) SecuredMessageand sign/verify services on an existing ETSI ITS communicationstack (ITSC). We have followed the new ETSI TS 103 097 v1.1.1standard when implementing the security services, and havemade our best to create a robust and secure implementation.Our goal has been to identify flaws and vulnerabilities in ourimplementation that are caused by weaknesses or deficienciesin the standard and in its description of services.We have then performed an analysis of the protocol, itsheaders and created test cases used to test our implementation.Several problems were found, and we have also repeated thetests with another, supposedly very stable implementation,provided by Fraunhofer FOKUS. To our surprise, this systemalso showed unexpected behavior as our system. We show thatthese problems are the result of weaknesses and complexitiesin the design of the standard.We present the problems found in our implementation andshow what part in the standard was causing the problems.We show that several problems in the standard, mainly dueto their complexity, open up for misinterpretation leadingto various types of implementation errors. We conclude thepaper with proposing changes to the standard to prevent otherimplementations from repeating the same mistakes.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Datorsystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Computer Systems (hsv//eng)

Keyword

SecuredMessage

ETSI TS 103 097 V1.1.1

connected car

V2X communications

Publication and Content Type

kon (subject category)

ref (subject category)