Simulating Cyber Attacks and Countermeasures in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks Using Cyber Operations Research Gym (CybORG)

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) enable realtime communication for safety-critical applications including collision avoidance and traffic control. Their decentralized, dynamic architecture, however, makes them vulnerable to multiple attack classes, including Sybil, spoofing, Denial-of-Service (DoS), and other cyber threats. Existing defenses typically address cyber and physical layers independently, limiting their ability to capture the interplay between mobility patterns and attack propagation. This paper presents a cyber-physical simulation framework integrating vehicular mobility with the CybORG environment for multi-class attack mitigation. A Road Side Unit (RSU) acts as the infrastructure-based defender, monitoring vehicle behavior, maintaining trust scores, and executing defense actions via a Dueling Double Deep Q-Network with Prioritized Experience Replay (D3QN-PER). The agent learns optimal policies through environment interaction rather than static labeled data. Evaluation against two unsupervised baselines, Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) and Trust-Gated Isolation Forest, demonstrates perfect detection performance (Recall = 100%, $\mathbf{F} \mathbf{1} \boldsymbol{=} \mathbf{1. 0 0 0 0})$ with zero false positives and zero false negatives, compared to 95.12% recall (EWMA) and 84.95% recall (Isolation Forest). The framework handles up to six concurrent attackers within the RSU's 200 m range with sub-millisecond latency, establishing a foundation for intelligent, adaptive security in vehicular networks.