Threat Aware Task Offloading and Caching for Secure UAV Assisted Vehicular Consumer Electronics

Abstract

Vehicular consumer electronics increasingly support computation-intensive and latency-sensitive services, imposing stringent efficiency, reliability, and security requirements on vehicular edge computing (VEC) systems. In dynamic vehicular environments, inference-based information leakage and anomalous communication behaviors further threaten system performance and data privacy. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a UAV-assisted cooperative VEC architecture that integrates threat-aware task offloading with intelligent spatiotemporal caching across roadside units (RSUs) and UAV edge nodes. A security-aware uplink transmission model is developed to capture potential information leakage risks and abnormal communication patterns, enabling adaptive offloading decisions. We formulate a joint optimization problem to minimize end-to-end task execution delay while improving cache utilization under limited computing and storage resources. To efficiently solve this problem, a Threat-Aware Joint Optimization (TAGO) framework is designed by combining proximal policy optimization for adaptive task offloading and a gradient-based caching update derived from the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to capture spatiotemporal service popularity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly reduces task delay and improves cache efficiency compared with several baseline strategies, showing its effectiveness for secure and efficient UAV-assisted vehicular consumer electronics systems.