Intrusion Detection in Vehicle Controller Area Network (CAN) Bus Using Machine Learning: A Comparative Performance Study

Electronic Control Units (ECUs) have been increasingly used in modern vehicles to control the operations of the vehicle, improve driving comfort, and safety. For the operation of the vehicle, these ECUs communicate using a Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol that has many security vulnerabilities. According to the report of Upstream 2022, more than 900 automotive cybersecurity incidents were reported in 2021 only. In addition to developing a more secure CAN protocol, intrusion detection can provide a path to mitigate cyberattacks on the vehicle. This paper proposes a machine learning-based intrusion detection system (IDS) using a Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and investigates the effectiveness of the IDS using multiple real-world datasets. The novelty of our developed IDS is that it has been trained and tested on multiple vehicular datasets (Kia Soul and a Chevrolet Spark) to detect and classify intrusion. Our IDS has achieved accuracy up to 99.9% with a high true positive and a low false negative rate. Finally, the comparison of our performance evaluation outcomes demonstrates that the proposed IDS outperforms the existing works in terms of its liability and efficiency to detect cyber-attacks with a minimal error rate.