Cybersecurity Threats in Connected and Automated Vehicles based Federated Learning Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates cybersecurity threats in federated learning systems within connected and automated vehicle networks, revealing vulnerabilities to falsified data attacks that impair model training and highlighting the need for advanced defense strategies.

Contribution

It identifies specific attack strategies on federated learning in vehicular networks and demonstrates their impact on model accuracy and convergence, emphasizing the necessity for new defense mechanisms.

Findings

Attacks increase model convergence time.

Attacks decrease model accuracy.

Existing defenses are bypassed by sophisticated attacks.

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning technique that aims at training an algorithm across decentralized entities holding their local data private. Wireless mobile networks allow users to communicate with other fixed or mobile users. The road traffic network represents an infrastructure-based configuration of a wireless mobile network where the Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV) represent the communicating entities. Applying FL in a wireless mobile network setting gives rise to a new threat in the mobile environment that is very different from the traditional fixed networks. The threat is due to the intrinsic characteristics of the wireless medium and is caused by the characteristics of the vehicular networks such as high node-mobility and rapidly changing topology. Most cyber defense techniques depend on highly reliable and connected networks. This paper explores falsified information attacks, which target the FL process that is ongoing at the RSU. We identified a number of attack strategies conducted by the malicious CAVs to disrupt the training of the global model in vehicular networks. We show that the attacks were able to increase the convergence time and decrease the accuracy the model. We demonstrate that our attacks bypass FL defense strategies in their primary form and highlight the need for novel poisoning resilience defense mechanisms in the wireless mobile setting of the future road networks.