Nowadays, vehicle industrialization has realized several connectivity
protocols to enable in-vehicle network communication. These protocols
have been collectively standardized in a de facto standard for the
in-vehicle network viz controller area network (CAN). Merely, CAN
protocol shortages several security features that make vehicular
communications susceptible to diverse message injection attacks that may
mislead original electronic control units (ECUs) or cause failures.
Therefore, defending the in-vehicle network from cyber-attacks is an
essential concern. This paper proposes a fast anomalous traffic
detection system for secure vehicular communications. The proposed
system differentiates the performance of four different machine-learning
approaches: Adaboost trees (ABT), Coarse decision trees (CDT), naïve
Bayes classifier (NBC), and support vector machine (SVM). The models
were evaluated on a recent dataset from a real-time vehicular
communications environment, the car-hacking-2018 dataset. Specifically,
the system considers five balanced classes, including one normal traffic
class and four classes for message injection attacks over the in-vehicle
controller area network: fuzzy attack, DoS attack, RPM attack
(spoofing), and gear attack (spoofing). Our best performance outcomes
belong to the ABT model, which notched 99.8% classification accuracy
and 6.67 µseconds of classification overhead. Such results have
outweighed existing in-vehicle intrusion detection systems employing the
same/similar dataset.