LSTM-Based Intrusion Detection System for VANETs: A Time Series Classification Approach to False Message Detection

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), vehicles broadcast emergency messages and beacon messages, which enable drivers to perceive traffic conditions beyond their visual range thus improve driving safety. However, internal attackers can launch a false message attack for selfish purposes by reporting a non-existent traffic incident in emergency messages. Moreover, some collusion attackers may spread bogus beacon messages cooperatively to make the bogus traffic incident more deceptive. To improve the accuracy of false emergency message detection, we propose a novel intrusion detection system (IDS) based on time series classification and deep learning. Considering that traffic parameters are highly correlated with time, we collect time series of traffic parameters closely related to traffic incidents from messages of vehicles near reported traffic incidents as time series feature vectors. To recognize the pattern of traffic parameters changing over time more accurately, a traffic incident classifier based on long short-term memory (LSTM) is designed and trained using time series feature vectors from both normal and collusion attack scenarios. Based on the classification result, the authenticity of the emergency message can be determined. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed LSTM-based IDS through extensive simulation. Simulation results validate that our IDS is more accurate in false message detection compared with some well-known machine learning-based schemes.