Sohaib Bin Altaf Khattak

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are used for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications. They are a special type of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that can share useful information to improve road traffic and safety. In VANETs, vehicles are interconnected through a wireless medium, making the network susceptible to various attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), or even black hole attacks that exploit the wireless medium to disrupt the network. These attacks degrade the network performance of VANETs and prevent legitimate users from accessing resources. VANETs face unique challenges due to the fast mobility of vehicles and dynamic changes in network topology. The high-speed movement of vehicles results in frequent alterations in the network structure, posing difficulties in establishing and maintaining stable communication. Moreover, the dynamic nature of VANETs, with vehicles joining and leaving the network regularly, adds complexity to implementing effective security measures. These inherent constraints necessitate the development of robust and efficient solutions tailored to VANETs, ensuring secure and reliable communication in dynamic and rapidly evolving environments. Therefore, securing communication in VANETs is a crucial requirement. Traditional security countermeasures are not pertinent to autonomous vehicles. However, many machine learning (ML) technologies are being utilized to classify malicious packet information and a variety of solutions have been suggested to improve security in VANETs. In this paper, we propose an enhanced intrusion detection framework for VANETs that leverages mutual information to select the most relevant features for building an effective model and synthetic minority oversampling (SMOTE) to deal with the class imbalance problem. Random Forest (RF) is applied as our classifier, and the proposed method is compared with different ML techniques such as logistic regression (LR), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), decision tree (DT), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The model is tested on three datasets, namely ToN-IoT, NSL-KDD, and CICIDS2017, addressing challenges such as missing values, unbalanced data, and categorical values. Our model demonstrated great performance in comparison to other models. It achieved high accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 score, with a 100% accuracy rate on the ToN-IoT dataset and 99.9% on both NSL-KDD and CICIDS2017 datasets. Furthermore, the ROC curve analysis demonstrated our model’s exceptional performance, achieving a 100% AUC score.