BoostGuard: Interpretable Misbehavior Detection in Vehicular Communication Networks

Wireless Communication and Artificial Intelligence are at the heart of driving the evolution in the transportation industry. Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems adopt vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology to allow vehicles to exchange real-time information about speed, heading, and location wirelessly with their surrounding vehicles. Such technology has remarkable benefits for improving vehicles’ safety and awareness, albeit imposing many security risks. Despite the evolving efforts to employ authentication mechanisms, there is no guarantee that the exchanged data is trustworthy. Security breaches causing falsified data can aggressively lead to severe safety damages within vehicular networks. This paper proposes, BoostGuard, a novel interpretable framework for detecting falsified data exchanged as part of five different types of position forging attacks against vehicular networks. BoostGuard mainly adopts data science principles and leverages advanced machine learning techniques (i.e., boosting decision tree ensemble) to boost its generalization capabilities for precisely detecting and classifying attack types. Extensive experiments are conducted over an open-source dataset, reflecting dynamic real-world vehicular environments. The evaluation results demonstrate that our solution outperforms existing solutions with high detection effectiveness and computational time efficiency.