Advancing Robustness and Privacy in Federated Learning for Secure Autonomous Vehicle Systems

The rapid development of Autonomous Vehicle Systems (AVS) is transforming transportation, enabling safer, more efficient mobility. However, ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive data generated by AVS remains a major challenge. Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution for AVS by enabling distributed machine learning across connected vehicles without sharing raw data, thereby enhancing privacy. Despite these advantages, FL faces critical challenges in autonomous driving environments, including high communication overhead, latency, and vulnerability to adversarial attacks. To address these challenges, we propose SecureFL, a novel framework designed to enhance the robustness and privacy of FL in autonomous vehicle systems. First, we propose a Federated Gradient Sign Attack (FGSA) detection mechanism using an ensemble of classifiers to identify and mitigate adversarial attacks that attempt to corrupt the global learning model. Then, we integrate a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based reputation system that evaluates the reliability of vehicles based on data quality, prioritizing contributions from trustworthy sources, and dynamically adjusting participation in the FL process. Finally, we introduce an uplink scheduling mechanism utilizing a rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) technique to optimize data transmission and reduce latency, ensuring efficient communication across the AVS network. The framework’s effectiveness is validated through simulations in real-world AVS environments, demonstrating SecureFL’s capability to strengthen security, privacy, and communication efficiency in federated learning for autonomous vehicles. This work contributes to advancing the robustness and privacy of FL, enabling safer and more secure autonomous driving.