A Machine-Learning-Based Technique for False Data Injection Attacks Detection in Industrial IoT

The accelerated move toward the adoption of the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) paradigm has resulted in numerous shortcomings as far as security is concerned. One of the IIoT affecting critical security threats is what is termed as the false data injection (FDI) attack. The FDI attacks aim to mislead the industrial platforms by falsifying their sensor measurements. FDI attacks have successfully overcome the classical threat detection approaches. In this article, we present a novel method of FDI attack detection using autoencoders (AEs). We exploit the sensor data correlation in time and space, which in turn can help identify the falsified data. Moreover, the falsified data are cleaned using the denoising AEs (DAEs). Performance evaluation proves the success of our technique in detecting FDI attacks. It also significantly outperforms a support vector machine (SVM)-based approach used for the same purpose. The DAE data cleaning algorithm is also shown to be very effective in recovering clean data from corrupted (attacked) data.