Feature engineering impact on position falsification attacks detection in vehicular ad-hoc network

The vehicular ad-hoc network is a technology that enables vehicles to interact with each other and the surrounding infrastructure, aiming to enhance road safety and driver comfort. However, it is susceptible to various security attacks. Among these attacks, the position falsification attack is regarded as one of the most serious, in which the malicious nodes tamper with their transmitted location. Thus, developing effective misbehavior detection schemes capable of detecting such attacks is crucial. Many of these schemes employ machine learning techniques to detect misbehavior based on the features of the exchanged messages. However, the studies that identify the impact of feature engineering on schemes’ performance and highlight the most efficient features and algorithms are limited. This paper conducts a comprehensive literature survey to identify the key features and algorithms used in the literature that lead to the best-performing models. Then, a comparative study using the VeReMi dataset, which is publicly available, is performed to assess six models implemented using three different machine learning algorithms and two feature sets: one comprising selected and derived features and the other including all message features. The findings show that two of the suggested models that employ feature engineering perform almost equally to existing studies in identifying two types of position falsification attacks while exhibiting performance improvements in detecting other types. Furthermore, the results of evaluating the proposed models using another simulation exhibit a substantial improvement achieved by employing feature engineering techniques, where the average accuracy of the models is increased by 6.31–47%, depending on the algorithm used.