Multibranch Reconstruction Error (MbRE) Intrusion Detection Architecture for Intelligent Edge-Based Policing in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

There has been a notable increase in the research and development of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) to efficiently and safely manage large amounts of traffic. Such networks are, however, also prone to various cyber threats to data integrity, privacy, authentication, and network availability, and given the potential risk to life under the event of a malfunction and misinformation, it is important to provide security measures against such threats. This paper presents the Multi-branch Reconstruction Error (MbRE) Intrusion Detection System (IDS) for edge-based anomaly detection in VANETs for data integrity, network availability and user authentication-based misbehaviors without the need to train on them. Vehicular data is first sequenced and separated into three data branches -frequency (F) derived from the message timestamps, pseudo-identities (I), and the motion data (M) i.e. position and velocity. The proposed model comprises of three Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)-based reconstruction models trained to reconstruct normal F-I-M vehicular behavior. The IDS classifies each branch of a sequence as 0/1 based on the reconstruction error threshold for the respective branch and, therefore, has the ability to detect 8 possible binary encoded behaviors for each sequence of vehicular data. These results are then used to find the overall behavior of each vehicle using carefully selected detection thresholds. MbRE is able to classify frequency, identity and motion-based behavior samples with an accuracy of 100%, 98.5-100%, and 95.4-100%, respectively, without the need to train on such behaviors. The study also emulates the IDS on Google Colaboratory and Jetson Nano to show its practicality in cloud and edge environments.