Clean-label Poisoning Attack and Defense Game for Federated Learning in Vehicular Networks

Abstract

This paper studies interactions between clean-label poisoning attack and defense in vehicular networks using federated learning (FL). Basic Safety Message (BSM) classification for anomaly detection is modeled as a distributed learning problem over a vehicular network with dynamic topology. As a critical threat to FL, a feature-space clean-label attack is introduced, wherein benign samples are perturbed toward malicious feature extremes, degrading class separability while preserving labels. To counter this, a feature-consistency relabeling defense is proposed to detect and relabel suspicious samples. A game-theoretic framework is developed to capture attack-defense interactions and characterize equilibrium strategies based on attack effectiveness and cost parameters. Results show that the attack scales effectively with compromised nodes, while the proposed defense keeps attack success low without degrading clean accuracy and shifts equilibrium regions toward attack-averse regimes.