Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

Machine Learning-Enabled IoT Security: Open Issues and Challenges Under Advanced Persistent Threats

Despite its technological benefits, Internet of Things (IoT) has cyber weaknesses due to the vulnerabilities in the wireless medium. Machine learning (ML)-based methods are widely used against cyber threats in IoT networks with promising performance. Advanced persistent threat (APT) is prominent for cybercriminals to compromise networks, and it is crucial to long-term and harmful characteristics. However, it is difficult to apply ML-based approaches to identify APT attacks to obtain a promising detection performance due to an extremely small percentage among normal traffic. There are limited surveys to fully investigate APT attacks in IoT networks due to the lack of public datasets with all types of APT attacks. It is worth to bridge the state-of-the-art in network attack detection with APT attack detection in a comprehensive review article. This survey article reviews the security challenges in IoT networks and presents the well-known attacks, APT attacks, and threat models in IoT systems. Meanwhile, signature-based, anomaly-based, and hybrid intrusion detection systems are summarized for IoT networks. The article highlights statistical insights regarding frequently applied ML-based methods against network intrusion alongside the number of attacks types detected. Finally, open issues and challenges for common network intrusion and APT attacks are presented for future research.Comment: ACM Computing Surveys, 2022, 35 pages, 10 Figures, 8 Table

Privacy Preservation Intrusion Detection Technique for SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems face the absence of a protection technique that can beat different types of intrusions and protect the data from disclosure while handling this data using other applications, specifically Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The SCADA system can manage the critical infrastructure of industrial control environments. Protecting sensitive information is a difficult task to achieve in reality with the connection of physical and digital systems. Hence, privacy preservation techniques have become effective in order to protect sensitive/private information and to detect malicious activities, but they are not accurate in terms of error detection, sensitivity percentage of data disclosure. In this paper, we propose a new Privacy Preservation Intrusion Detection (PPID) technique based on the correlation coefficient and Expectation Maximisation (EM) clustering mechanisms for selecting important portions of data and recognizing intrusive events. This technique is evaluated on the power system datasets for multiclass attacks to measure its reliability for detecting suspicious activities. The experimental results outperform three techniques in the above terms, showing the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed technique to be utilized for current SCADA systems

A Systematic Review of the State of Cyber-Security in Water Systems

Critical infrastructure systems are evolving from isolated bespoke systems to those that use general-purpose computing hosts, IoT sensors, edge computing, wireless networks and artificial intelligence. Although this move improves sensing and control capacity and gives better integration with business requirements, it also increases the scope for attack from malicious entities that intend to conduct industrial espionage and sabotage against these systems. In this paper, we review the state of the cyber-security research that is focused on improving the security of the water supply and wastewater collection and treatment systems that form part of the critical national infrastructure. We cover the publication statistics of the research in this area, the aspects of security being addressed, and future work required to achieve better cyber-security for water systems

A Survey on Industrial Control System Testbeds and Datasets for Security Research

The increasing digitization and interconnection of legacy Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) open new vulnerability surfaces, exposing such systems to malicious attackers. Furthermore, since ICSs are often employed in critical infrastructures (e.g., nuclear plants) and manufacturing companies (e.g., chemical industries), attacks can lead to devastating physical damages. In dealing with this security requirement, the research community focuses on developing new security mechanisms such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs), facilitated by leveraging modern machine learning techniques. However, these algorithms require a testing platform and a considerable amount of data to be trained and tested accurately. To satisfy this prerequisite, Academia, Industry, and Government are increasingly proposing testbed (i.e., scaled-down versions of ICSs or simulations) to test the performances of the IDSs. Furthermore, to enable researchers to cross-validate security systems (e.g., security-by-design concepts or anomaly detectors), several datasets have been collected from testbeds and shared with the community. In this paper, we provide a deep and comprehensive overview of ICSs, presenting the architecture design, the employed devices, and the security protocols implemented. We then collect, compare, and describe testbeds and datasets in the literature, highlighting key challenges and design guidelines to keep in mind in the design phases. Furthermore, we enrich our work by reporting the best performing IDS algorithms tested on every dataset to create a baseline in state of the art for this field. Finally, driven by knowledge accumulated during this survey's development, we report advice and good practices on the development, the choice, and the utilization of testbeds, datasets, and IDSs

A Deep Learning based Detection Method for Combined Integrity-Availability Cyber Attacks in Power System

As one of the largest and most complex systems on earth, power grid (PG) operation and control have stepped forward as a compound analysis on both physical and cyber layers which makes it vulnerable to assaults from economic and security considerations. A new type of attack, namely as combined data Integrity-Availability attack, has been recently proposed, where the attackers can simultaneously manipulate and blind some measurements on SCADA system to mislead the control operation and keep stealthy. Compared with traditional FDIAs, this combined attack can further complicate and vitiate the model-based detection mechanism. To detect such attack, this paper proposes a novel random denoising LSTM-AE (LSTMRDAE) framework, where the spatial-temporal correlations of measurements can be explicitly captured and the unavailable data is countered by the random dropout layer. The proposed algorithm is evaluated and the performance is verified on a standard IEEE 118-bus system under various unseen attack attempts