Industrial control systems (ICSs) are widely used and vital to industry and society. Their failure can have severe impact on both the economy and human life. Hence, these systems have become an attractive target for physical and cyber attacks alike. In this article, we examine an attack detection method based on simple and lightweight neural networks, namely, 1D convolutional neural networks and autoencoders. We apply these networks to both the time and frequency domains of the data and discuss the pros and cons of each representation approach. The suggested method is evaluated on three popular public datasets, and detection rates matching or exceeding previously published detection results are achieved, while demonstrating a small footprint, short training and detection times, and generality. We also show the effectiveness of PCA, which, given proper data preprocessing and feature selection, can provide high attack detection rates in many settings. Finally, we study the proposed method’s robustness against adversarial attacks that exploit inherent blind spots of neural networks to evade detection while achieving their intended physical effect. Our results show that the proposed method is robust to such evasion attacks: in order to evade detection, the attacker is forced to sacrifice the desired physical impact on the system.

Ultrasonic distance sensors use an ultrasonic pulse’s time of flight to calculate the distance to the reflecting object. Widely used in industry, these sensors are an important component in autonomous vehicles, where they are used for such tasks as object avoidance and altitude measurement. The proper operation of such autonomous vehicles relies on sensor measurements; therefore, an adversary that has the ability to undermine the sensor’s reliability can pose a major risk to the vehicle. Previous attempts to alter the measurements of this sensor using an external signal succeeded in performing a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, in which the sensor’s reading showed a constant value, and a spoofing attack, in which the attacker could control the measurement to some extent. However, these attacks require precise knowledge of the sensor and its operation (e.g., timing of the ultrasonic pulse sent by the sensor). In this paper, we present an attack on ultrasonic distance sensors in which the measured distance can be altered (i.e., spoofing attack). The attack exploits a vulnerability discovered in the ultrasonic sensor’s receiver that results in a fake pulse that is produced by a constant noise in the input. A major advantage of the proposed attack is that, unlike previous attacks, a constant signal is used, and therefore, no prior knowledge of the sensor’s relative location or its timing behavior is required. We demonstrate the attack in both a lab setup (testbed) and a real setup involving a drone to demonstrate its feasibility. Our experiments show that the attack can interfere with the proper operation of the vehicle. In addition to the risk that the attack poses to autonomous vehicles, it can also be used as an effective defensive tool for restricting the movement of unauthorized autonomous vehicles within a protected area.

In recent years, a variety of effective neural network-based methods for anomaly and cyber attack detection in industrial control systems (ICSs) have been demonstrated in the literature. Given their successful implementation and widespread use, there is a need to study adversarial attacks on such detection methods to better protect the systems that depend upon them. The extensive research performed on adversarial attacks on image and malware classification has little relevance to the physical system state prediction domain, which most of the ICS attack detection systems belong to. Moreover, such detection systems are typically retrained using new data collected from the monitored system, thus the threat of adversarial data poisoning is significant, however this threat has not yet been addressed by the research community. In this paper, we present the first study focused on poisoning attacks on online-trained autoencoder-based attack detectors. We propose two algorithms for generating poison samples, an interpolation-based algorithm and a back-gradient optimization-based algorithm, which we evaluate on both synthetic and real-world ICS data. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can generate poison samples that cause the target attack to go undetected by the autoencoder detector, however the ability to poison the detector is limited to a small set of attack types and magnitudes. When the poison-generating algorithms are applied to the popular SWaT dataset, we show that the autoencoder detector trained on the physical system state data is resilient to poisoning in the face of all ten of the relevant attacks in the dataset. This finding suggests that neural network-based attack detectors used in the cyber-physical domain are more robust to poisoning than in other problem domains, such as malware detection and image processing.

Industrial control systems (ICSs) are widely used and vital to industry and society. Their failure can have severe impact on both economics and human life. Hence, these systems have become an attractive target for attacks, both physical and cyber. A number of attack detection methods have been proposed, however they are characterized by a low detection rate, a substantial false positive rate, or are system specific. In this paper, we study an attack detection method based on simple and lightweight neural networks, namely, 1D convolutions and autoencoders. We apply these networks to both the time and frequency domains of the collected data and discuss pros and cons of each approach. We evaluate the suggested method on three popular public datasets and achieve detection rates matching or exceeding previously published detection results, while featuring small footprint, short training and detection times, and generality. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of PCA, which, given proper data preprocessing and feature selection, can provide high attack detection scores in many settings. Finally, we study the proposed method's robustness against adversarial attacks, that exploit inherent blind spots of neural networks to evade detection while achieving their intended physical effect. Our results show that the proposed method is robust to such evasion attacks: in order to evade detection, the attacker is forced to sacrifice the desired physical impact on the system. This finding suggests that neural networks trained under the constraints of the laws of physics can be trusted more than networks trained under more flexible conditions.

This paper presents a study on detecting cyberattacks on industrial control systems (ICS) using unsupervised deep neural networks, specifically, convolutional neural networks. The study was performed on a SecureWater Treatment testbed (SWaT) dataset, which represents a scaled-down version of a real-world industrial water treatment plant. e suggest a method for anomaly detection based on measuring the statistical deviation of the predicted value from the observed value.We applied the proposed method by using a variety of deep neural networks architectures including different variants of convolutional and recurrent networks. The test dataset from SWaT included 36 different cyberattacks. The proposed method successfully detects the vast majority of the attacks with a low false positive rate thus improving on previous works based on this data set. The results of the study show that 1D convolutional networks can be successfully applied to anomaly detection in industrial control systems and outperform more complex recurrent networks while being much smaller and faster to train.