Federated learning-based scheme for detecting passive mobile attackers in 5G vehicular edge computing

Detecting passive attacks is always considered difficult in vehicular networks. Passive attackers can eavesdrop on the wireless medium to collect beacons. These beacons can be exploited to track the positions of vehicles not only to violate their location privacy but also for criminal purposes. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning-based scheme for detecting passive mobile attackers in 5G vehicular edge computing. We first identify a set of strategies that can be used by attackers to efficiently track vehicles without being visually detected. We then build an efficient machine learning (ML) model to detect tracking attacks based only on the receiving beacons. Our scheme enables federated learning (FL) at the edge to ensure collaborative learning while preserving the privacy of vehicles. Moreover, FL clients use a semi-supervised learning approach to ensure accurate self-labeling. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme to detect passive mobile attackers quickly and with high accuracy. Indeed, only 20 received beacons are required to achieve 95% accuracy. This accuracy can be achieved within 60 FL rounds using 5 FL clients in each FL round. The obtained results are also validated through simulations.