loading page

Moving Target Defense Approach for Secure Relay Selection in Vehicular Networks
  • +4
  • Esraa M. Ghourab ,
  • Shimaa Naser ,
  • Sami Muhaidat ,
  • Lina Bariah ,
  • Mahmoud Al-Qutayri ,
  • Paschalis C. Sofotasios ,
  • Ernesto Damiani
Esraa M. Ghourab
Essra M. Ghourab

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile
Shimaa Naser
Author Profile
Sami Muhaidat
Author Profile
Lina Bariah
Author Profile
Mahmoud Al-Qutayri
Author Profile
Paschalis C. Sofotasios
Author Profile
Ernesto Damiani
Author Profile

Abstract

Ensuring the security and reliability of cooperative vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications is an extremely challenging task, due to the dynamic nature of vehicular networks as well as the delay-sensitive wireless medium. The moving target defense (MTD) paradigm has been proposed to overcome the challenges of conventional solutions, based on static network services and configurations. Specifically, the MTD approach involves the dynamic altering of the network configurations to improve resilience to cyberattacks. Nevertheless, the current MTD solution for cooperative networks has several limitations, such as they are not well-suited for highly dynamic environments; they require high synchronization modules that are resource-intensive and difficult to implement; and finally, they rely heavily on the attack-defense models, which may not always be accurate or comprehensive to use. In this paper, we propose an intelligent spatiotemporal diversification MTD scheme to defend against eavesdropping attacks in cooperative V2V networks. Specifically, we design benign random data injection patterns to meet the security and reliability requirements of the vehicular network. Our methodology involves modeling the configuration of vehicular relays and data injection patterns as a Markov decision process, followed by applying deep reinforcement learning to determine the optimal configuration. We then iteratively evaluate the intercept probability and the percentage of transmitted real data for each configuration until convergence is achieved. In order to optimize the security-real data percentage (S-RDP), we developed a two-agent framework, namely MTD-DQN-RSS & MTD-DQN-RSS-RDP. The first agent, MTD-DQN-RSS, tries to minimize the intercept probability by injecting additional fake data, which in turn reduces the overall RDP, while the second agent, MTD-DQN-RSS-RDP, attempts to inject a sufficient amount of fake data to achieve a target S-RDP. Finally, extensive simulation results are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution where they improved the system security by almost 28% and 49%, respectively compared to the conventional relay selection approach.