Achieving model explainability for intrusion detection in VANETs with LIME

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2023 Jun 22:9:e1440. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1440. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are intelligent transport subsystems; vehicles can communicate through a wireless medium in this system. There are many applications of VANETs such as traffic safety and preventing the accident of vehicles. Many attacks affect VANETs communication such as denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS). In the past few years the number of DoS (denial of service) attacks are increasing, so network security and protection of the communication systems are challenging topics; intrusion detection systems need to be improved to identify these attacks effectively and efficiently. Many researchers are currently interested in enhancing the security of VANETs. Based on intrusion detection systems (IDS), machine learning (ML) techniques were employed to develop high-security capabilities. A massive dataset containing application layer network traffic is deployed for this purpose. Interpretability technique Local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) technique for better interpretation model functionality and accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that utilizing a random forest (RF) classifier achieves 100% accuracy, demonstrating its capability to identify intrusion-based threats in a VANET setting. In addition, LIME is applied to the RF machine learning model to explain and interpret the classification, and the performance of machine learning models is evaluated in terms of accuracy, recall, and F1 score.

Keywords: Intelligent transport subsystem; Intrusion detection; Security and privacy; VANETs.

Grants and funding

This research was funded by the Beijing Key Laboratory of work Safety Intelligent Monitoring (Beijing University of Post and Telecommunication), National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant Number 62127802. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.