An Intelligent Secured Framework for Cyberattack Detection in Electric Vehicles’ CAN Bus Using Machine Learning

Electric Vehicles’ Controller Area Network (CAN) bus serves as a legacy protocol for in-vehicle network communication. Simplicity, robustness, and suitability for real-time systems are the salient features of CAN bus. Unfortunately, the CAN bus protocol is vulnerable to various cyberattacks due to the lack of a message authentication mechanism in the protocol itself, paving the way for attackers to penetrate the network. This paper proposes a new effective anomaly detection model based on a modified one-class support vector machine in the CAN traffic. The proposed model makes use of an improved algorithm, known as the modified bat algorithm, to find the most accurate structure in the offline training. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, CAN traffic is logged from an unmodified licensed electric vehicle in normal operation to generate a dataset for each message ID and a corresponding occurrence frequency without any attacks. In addition, to measure the performance and superiority of the proposed method compared to the other two famous CAN bus anomaly detection algorithms such as Isolation Forest and classical one-class support vector machine, we provided Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) for each method to quantify the correctly classified windows in the test sets containing attacks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieved the highest rate of True Positive Rate (TPR) and lowest False Positive Rate (FPR) for anomaly detection compared to the other two algorithms. Moreover, in order to show that the proposed method can be applied to other datasets, we used two recent popular public datasets in the scope of CAN bus traffic anomaly detection. Benchmarking with more CAN bus traffic datasets proves the independency of the proposed method from the meaning of each message ID and data field that make the model adaptable with different CAN datasets.