A Machine Learning Approach for Anomaly Detection in Industrial Control Systems Based on Measurement Data

Attack detection problems in industrial control systems (ICSs) are commonly known as a network traffic monitoring scheme for detecting abnormal activities. However, a network-based intrusion detection system can be deceived by attackers that imitate the system’s normal activity. In this work, we proposed a novel solution to this problem based on measurement data in the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. The proposed approach is called measurement intrusion detection system (MIDS), which enables the system to detect any abnormal activity in the system even if the attacker tries to conceal it in the system’s control layer. A supervised machine learning model is generated to classify normal and abnormal activities in an ICS to evaluate the MIDS performance. A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed is developed to simulate the power generation units and exploit the attack dataset. In the proposed approach, we applied several machine learning models on the dataset, which show remarkable performances in detecting the dataset’s anomalies, especially stealthy attacks. The results show that the random forest is performing better than other classifier algorithms in detecting anomalies based on measured data in the testbed.