AI-Based Malicious Network Traffic Detection in VANETs

Inherent unreliability of wireless communications may have crucial consequences when safety-critical C-ITS applications enabled by VANETs are concerned. Although natural sources of packet losses in VANETs such as network traffic congestion are handled by decentralized congestion control (DCC), losses caused by malicious interference need to be controlled too. For example, jamming DoS attacks on CAMs may endanger vehicular safety, and first and foremost are to be detected in real time. Our first goal is to discuss key literature on jamming modeling in VANETs and revisit some existing detection methods. Our second goal is to present and evaluate our own recent results on how to address the real-time jamming detection problem in V2X safety-critical scenarios with the use of AI. We conclude that our hybrid jamming detector, which combines statistical network traffic analysis with data mining methods, allows the achievement of acceptable performance even when random jitter accompanies the generation of CAMs, which complicates the analysis of the reasons for their losses in VANETs. The use case of the study is a challenging platooning C-ITS application, where V2X-enabled vehicles move together at highway speeds with short inter-vehicle gaps.