PAMPOS: Causal Transformer-based Trajectory Prediction for Attack-Agnostic Misbehavior Detection in V2X Networks

TL;DR

PAMPOS is a causal transformer-based model that detects misbehavior in V2X networks by learning normal vehicle trajectories and identifying deviations without needing attack labels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, attack-agnostic misbehavior detection method using causal transformers trained on benign data, capable of localizing falsifications.

Findings

Achieves up to 0.98 AUC in detecting attacks.

F1-scores reach up to 0.95 across attack types.

Effective in diverse traffic scenarios.

Abstract

Misbehavior detection in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) networks is a second line of defense against insider falsification attacks that cryptographic mechanisms alone cannot address. Existing learning-based Misbehavior Detection Schemes (MDSs) are supervised, requiring labeled attack samples at training time, thus failing to counter unseen falsification attacks. We present PAMPOS, a causal transformer-decoder trained on benign VeReMi++ trajectories to learn normal mobility patterns. At inference time, misbehavior is identified as a deviation from the model's next-step kinematic predictions using a top-K normalized anomaly scoring mechanism that localizes falsification to specific kinematic features, without requiring attack-labeled training data. We evaluate PAMPOS across all 19 attack types in VeReMi++ under rush-hour and afternoon scenarios, achieving Area Under the Curve (AUC) values of up to 0.98 and F1-scores of up to 0.95 for most attack categories.