Paper Detail

Autonomous Cyber Defense in Connected Vehicles: A Multi-Agent Approach to V2X Security

Krishna Teja Medam

arxiv Score 10.3

Published 2026-08-19 · First seen 2026-08-20

General AI

Abstract

A connected vehicle has roughly 100 milliseconds to decide whether an incoming Basic Safety Message is real or fabricated. If a false emergency braking alert reaches the planning pipeline in time, the car brakes - a safety failure triggered by a security failure. Existing intrusion detection systems are not designed to handle that coupling. They operate per vehicle, per message, with static rules - blind to attack patterns that only emerge across a fleet or over time, and blind to the fundamental tension between dropping a suspicious message and dropping a real emergency alert. We propose a three-tier multi-agent architecture that treats this timing constraint as a hard design requirement, not a performance target. At the vehicle level, an onboard agent classifies each incoming V2X message into one of four actions - Accept, Drop, Quarantine, or Escalate - within a 10-millisecond budget, deliberately biased toward Escalate when uncertain, passing ambiguous cases to the roadside edge agent rather than risking a dropped legitimate alert. The edge agent operates across a roadside unit zone with a 50-millisecond budget, fusing threat assessments from multiple vehicles and resolving safety-security conflicts using complementary sensor observations. The cloud tier refines detection models through Byzantine fault-tolerant federated learning and redistributes updated weights to the fleet. Every timing constraint derives directly from the 100-millisecond Basic Safety Message cycles mandated by SAE J2735 and ETSI EN 302 637-2. No existing framework simultaneously assigns standards-grounded latency budgets to all three deployment tiers while treating safety-security conflict resolution as a first-class design constraint. Remaining open problems - adversarial poisoning at the edge and the absence of regulatory frameworks for autonomous security response - are discussed as future work.

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BibTeX

@article{medam2026autonomous,
  title = {Autonomous Cyber Defense in Connected Vehicles: A Multi-Agent Approach to V2X Security},
  author = {Krishna Teja Medam},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {A connected vehicle has roughly 100 milliseconds to decide whether an incoming Basic Safety Message is real or fabricated. If a false emergency braking alert reaches the planning pipeline in time, the car brakes - a safety failure triggered by a security failure. Existing intrusion detection systems are not designed to handle that coupling. They operate per vehicle, per message, with static rules - blind to attack patterns that only emerge across a fleet or over time, and blind to the fundamenta},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19135},
  keywords = {cs.CR, cs.DC, cs.MA, cs.NI},
  eprint = {2608.19135},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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