Blockchain and Federated Learning for Collaborative Intrusion Detection in Vehicular Edge Computing

The vehicular networks constructed by interconnected vehicles and transportation infrastructure are vulnerable to cyber-intrusions due to the expanded use of software and the introduction of wireless interfaces. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) can be customized efficiently in response to this increased attack surface. There has been significant progress in detecting malicious attack traffic using machine learning approaches. However, existing IDSs require network devices with powerful computing capabilities to continuously train and update complex network models, which reduces the efficiency and defense capability of intrusion detection systems due to limited resources and untimely model updates. This work proposes a cooperative intrusion detection mechanism that offloads the training model to distributed edge devices (e.g., connected vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Distributed federated-based approach reduces resource utilization of the central server while assuring security and privacy. To ensure the security of the aggregation model, blockchain is used for the storage and sharing of the training models. This work analyzes common attacks and shows that the proposed scheme achieves cooperative privacy-preservation for vehicles while reducing communication overhead and computation cost.