Detection of false position attacks in VANETs through bagging ensemble learning

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are critical to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), enabling vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication to improve road safety and traffic flow. However, VANETs face significant security threats, particularly position falsification attacks, where malicious nodes disseminate false Basic Safety Messages (BSMs). This study proposes an ensemble learning framework to detect such attacks, leveraging Decision Tree (CART), Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers enhanced with bagging. Using the VeReMi dataset, our RSU-level detection system analyzes sequential BSMs to detect malicious behavior. Results demonstrate that KNN with bagging achieves perfect precision, recall, accuracy, and F1 score (100%) for Attack 1, while maintaining near-perfect performance for complex attacks like Attack 2 (99.87% accuracy) and Attack 16 (97.85% accuracy). Decision Tree with bagging also performs well for simpler attacks but experiences a slight decline for highly complex scenarios. Random Forest with bagging excels in simpler attacks but struggles with complex patterns. MLP with bagging shows strong results for simpler attacks but underperforms in complex scenarios. The proposed framework highlights the effectiveness of ensemble techniques, particularly KNN with bagging, in safeguarding VANET communication systems, offering a scalable, efficient, and robust solution for VANET security.