Physics-Based Misbehavior Detection System for V2X Communications

Vehicle to Everything (V2X) allows vehicles, pedestrians, and infrastructure to share information for the purpose of enhancing road safety, improving traffic conditions, and lowering transporation costs. Although V2X messages are authenticated, their content is not validated. Sensor errors or adversarial attacks can cause messages to be perturbed increasing the likelihood of traffic jams, compromising the decision process of other vehicles, and provoking fatal crashes. In this article, we introduce V2X Core Anomaly Detection System (VCADS), a system based on the theory presented in [1] and built for the fields provided in the periodic messages shared across vehicles (i.e., Basic Safety Messages, BSMs). VCADS uses physics-based models to constrain the values in each field and detect anomalies by finding the numerical difference between a field and and its derivation using orthogonal values. VCADS evaluation is performed with four real V2X field testing datasets and a suite of attack simulations. The results show that VCADS can constrain a variety of real-world network environments and is able to detect ∼85% to ∼95% of attacks coming from an adversary capable of perturbing one or more data fields.