Advanced Intrusion Detection Combining Signature-Based and Behavior-Based Detection Methods

Recently, devices in real-time systems, such as residential facilities, vehicles, factories, and social infrastructure, have been increasingly connected to communication networks. Although these devices provide administrative convenience and enable the development of more sophisticated control systems, critical cybersecurity concerns and challenges remain. In this paper, we propose a hybrid anomaly detection method that combines statistical filtering and a composite autoencoder to effectively detect anomalous behaviors possibly caused by malicious activity in order to mitigate the risk of cyberattacks. We used the SWaT dataset, which was collected from a real water treatment system, to conduct a case study of cyberattacks on industrial control systems to validate the performance of the proposed approach. We then evaluated the performance of the proposed hybrid detection method on a dataset with two time window settings for the composite autoencoder. According to the experimental results, the proposed method improved the precision, recall, and F1-score by up to 0.008, 0.067, and 0.039, respectively, compared to an autoencoder-only approach. Moreover, we evaluated the computational cost of the proposed method in terms of execution time. The execution time of the proposed method was reduced by up to 8.03% compared to that of an autoencoder-only approach. Through the experimental results, we show that the proposed method detected more anomalies than an autoencoder-only detection approach and it also operated significantly faster.