Analyzing and Securing SOME/IP Automotive Services with Formal and Practical Methods

Abstract

Automotive Ethernet is increasingly used in modern vehicles and complements or replaces legacy bus systems such as CAN. Ethernet also enables service-oriented communication with the Scalable service-Oriented MiddlewarE over IP (SOME/IP) middleware. In this paper, we present a formal and practical security analysis of SOME/IP, the identified Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks, and propose two security extensions. The attacks are possible even if SOME/IP is used in combination with link layer security mechanisms. The attacker can impersonate a service offering server and a service consuming client. The two most common communication methods, request/response and publish/subscribe, are both vulnerable. In most communication scenarios, we are able to route all messages over the attacker. Our security extensions for authentication and authorization of service provisioning and usage protect against these attacks. We formally analyze the security and evaluate the overhead with practical implementations. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Security protocols; Embedded systems security; • Applied computing → Transportation.

Security Analysis and Improvement of Vehicle Ethernet SOME/IP Protocol

“…The analysis shows that in the process of communication transmission, the state space of the reinforcement scheme is significantly reduced, the security performance is also significantly improved, and the calculation time is also greatly reduced. Reference [31] uses Tamarin to analyze the SOME/IP protocol formally. The analysis results show that the protocol has three different types of man-in-the-middle attack vulnerabilities.…”

Protecting SOME/IP Communication via Authentication Ticket

“…The advantage of flexible communication of SOME/IP, though, can be a security vulnerability. As a result, researchers have revealed several feasible MITM attacks related to SOME/IP communication [ 12 , 13 ]. Since the importance of protecting vehicle control and messages is very high, a secure SOME/IP communication method that is both robust against possible attacks while maintaining the advantages of the SOME/IP-SD protocol is required.…”

“…A detailed description of representative MITM attacks is explained in the blog [ 12 ] written by Shir Mousseri from ARGUS cyber security. Zelle et al [ 13 ] present various MITM attack scenarios that can occur in SOME/IP, as well as the feasibility of the attacks in detail. Since actual vehicle control messages can create hazardous situations when attacked, a method that mitigates MITM attacks and does not affect the vehicle’s requirements is needed.…”

“…To ensure the secure usage of SOME/IP, there are various papers [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ] available. Among them, I have compared two early papers with my own research.…”

“…Zelle et al [ 13 ] presented several SOME/IP MITM attack scenarios and showed the feasibility of actual MITM attacks using the revealed attack procedures. The authors suggested two security extensions as MITM attack mitigation methods.…”