A Formal Analysis of Emergency Communication System Based on Model Checking

Emergency communication system is utilized widely to serve professional mobile communication for public security. Strict inspections must be conducted to ensure the system's high reliability, as inherent protocol complexities and design flaws may cause logical vulnerabilities in protocol implementation. In this paper, we investigate the security of the emergency communication, taking the TETRA system as an example. Specifically, we analyze two critical procedures (i.e., registration and call control) of the TETRA system. As a result, we uncover several potential flaws in the system. Furthermore, to expose vulnerabilities, we apply model checking to the automatic analysis of the TETRA system using the tool NuSMV. At last, we verified our findings in the real TETRA testbed environment. The results show that the attacks can induce service disruption, and the proposed method is feasible to TETRA system analysis.