FL-BC-IDS: Evidence-Native Privacy-Aware Hierarchical Federated Intrusion Detection for the Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) intrusion detection systems (IDSs) require collaborative learning that preserves raw-data locality while producing independently checkable post-run evidence. This paper presents FL-BC-IDS, an evidence-native, privacy-aware hierarchical federated IDS in which vehicles train Differentially Private XGBoost models, roadside units perform deterministic admission and tree-bagging aggregation, and the GLOBAL stage forms an equal-weight ensemble over validated RSU models. Signed reports, privacy records, SHA-256/Poseidon commitments, scoped Groth16 proofs, reconstructable public inputs, and digest-pinned blockchain receipts provide a unified verification path. Across 10 seed-controlled runs, the mean ± SD accuracy/F1 values were 0.998021±0.000246/0.983597±0.002053 on CSE-CIC-IDS2018 and 0.999867±0.000152/0.999495±0.000579 on CICIoV2024. With thresholds fixed exclusively from development data, the strict held-out-attack macro recall was 0.8031 and 0.9090 on CSE-CIC-IDS2018 and CICIoV2024, respectively, indicating residual attack-specific generalization limitations; supervised rolling-origin temporal refresh on CSE-CIC-IDS2018 achieved 0.984788 pooled seen-attack recall at a 0.005700 test FPR. A controlled 20-vehicle, eight-round heterogeneity and participation stress test retained 0.998151 accuracy and 0.984782 F1-score. Verification rejected invalid or context-mismatched artifacts and independently checked model–anchor consistency, RSU aggregation replay, commitments, and public inputs. The reported DP budgets are conditional learner-stage bounds for learner-input record instances, not end-to-end guarantees for original pre-preprocessing records.