A federated learning framework for cyberattack detection in vehicular sensor networks

Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSN) introduced a new paradigm for modern transportation systems by improving traffic management and comfort. However, the increasing adoption of smart sensing technologies with the Internet of Things (IoT) made VSN a high-value target for cybercriminals. In recent years, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques attracted the research community to develop security solutions for IoT networks. Traditional ML and DL approaches that operate with data stored on a centralized server raise major privacy problems for user data. On the other hand, the resource-constrained nature of a smart sensing network demands lightweight security solutions. To address these issues, this article proposes a Federated Learning (FL)-based attack detection framework for VSN. The proposed scheme utilizes a group of Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) with a Random Forest (RF)-based ensembler unit. The effectiveness of the suggested framework is investigated through multiple performance metrics. Experimental findings indicate that the proposed FL approach successfully detected the cyberattacks in VSN with the highest accuracy of 99.52%. The other performance scores, precision, recall, and F1 are attained as 99.77%, 99.54%, and 99.65%, respectively.