Sustainable and lightweight domain-based intrusion detection system for in-vehicle network

Abstract

Intelligent transportation systems are designed to enhance and optimize the traffic flow, safety of urban mobility, and improve energy efficiency. While advanced vehicles are equipped with new features, such as communication technologies for the exchange of safety messages, the communication interfaces of the vehicles increase the attack surfaces for attackers to exploit, even into the in-vehicle network (IVN). The automotive Ethernet and intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are promising solutions to the security problem inside the IVN. The automotive Ethernet has higher bandwidth capacity at an economical cost and flexibility for expansion than the current solution. The IDSs can protect the IVN from attackers compromising the vehicle. They can be implemented based on machine learning to learn from the normal IVN traffic behavior. However, numerous IDSs that utilize machine learning face hardware limitations when training within the in-vehicle network. Thus, the models have to be trained outside the IVN and then imported into it. Moreover, the IVN messages are unlabeled whether they are normal or under attack. We propose a lightweight unsupervised IDS that enables training in the IVN with limited computation resources. Our IDS models have an impressive parameter reduction of up to 94% compared to existing models. This leads to a remarkable reduction in memory usage of up to 86%, training time slashed by up to 69%, and a remarkable drop in energy consumption by up to 68%. Despite the size reduction, the proposed models remain only slightly less accurate than current solutions by up to 2%.