Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) enable vehicles to cooperate with each other and can be used to increase traffic safety and traffic flow. There are several standard initiatives for C-ITS, such as WAVE in the US, ARIB in Japan and ETSI ITS G5 in Europe.

Decentralized Environment Notification Message (DENM) is a kind of message within ETSI TC ITS. DENMs are event-triggered, multi-hop notification messages that can be for- warded using Keep-Alive Forwarding (KAF).

In this thesis, KAF is used to flood the network with DENMs sent from a single attack- ing vehicle. Using the simulation tools SUMO, OmNet++ and Veins, a highway scenario is studied. In the scenario, a vehicle sends out a DENM into a network that is being attacked by one other vehicle. Due to how KAF allows messages to be forwarded the other vehicles help flood the network. The results clearly indicate that KAF can be abused to create a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. After just a few seconds, the attack has introduced large de- lays and very high packet loss. The delay to receive a DENM is increased by several orders of magnitude and the packet loss reach unacceptable levels. By getting DENMs several seconds after they are needed, or by not getting them at all, could lead to traffic hazards.