RAPID-AV: Realtime Adaptive and Intelligent Detection For AV’s Against DDoS Attacks

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) increasingly rely on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks for communication. However, due to the devices’ heterogeneity, they are more susceptible to attacks like distributed denial of service (DDoS), resulting in packet loss and transmission delays. Existing solutions to these issues often create bottlenecks and lack post-attack recovery mechanisms. To solve these problems, this paper proposes RAPID-AV, an ML-based approach that uses programmable P4 switches for real-time detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks in AV networks. The proposed system uses a threefold strategy: collect traffic statistics from AV, use P4-based programmable packet processing for anomaly detection, and use majority voting to mitigate attacks. In our experiments, we found that the decision tree algorithm achieves an accuracy of 94.33% in distinguishing traffic from DDoS traffic. In addition, RAPID-AV demonstrated a nearly 10% reduction in CPU load during attacks and maintained consistent communication between AV and RSU. This approach can help improve AV network security while addressing the limitations of existing solutions.