Zhigang Cao

Dr. Zhigang Cao

orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

2Years (2025-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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30 April 2025 in Electronics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
ZCZhigang Cao
Zhigang Cao
BLBo Liu
Bo Liu
DGDongzhan Gao
Dongzhan Gao
DZDing Zhou
Ding Zhou
XHXiaopeng Han
Xiaopeng Han
Jiuxin CaoJiuxin Cao
Jiuxin Cao
With the continuous development of industrial intelligence, the integration of cyber–physical components creates a need for effective attack detection methods to mitigate potential DDoS threats. Although several DDoS attack detection modeling approaches have been proposed, few effectively incorporate the unique characteristics of industrial control system (ICS) architectures and traffic patterns. This paper focuses on DDoS attack detection within cloud–edge collaborative ICSs and proposes a novel detection model called FedDynST. This model combines federated learning and deep learning to construct feature graphs of traffic data. Introducing dynamic and static adjacency matrices, this work reveals the interactions between long-term industrial traffic data and short-term anomalies associated with DDoS attacks. Convolutional neural networks are utilized to capture distinctive temporal features within industrial traffic, thereby improving the detection precision. Moreover, the model enables continuous optimization of the global detection framework through a federated learning-based distributed training and aggregation mechanism, ensuring the privacy and security of industrial client data. The effectiveness of the FedDynST model was validated on the CICDDoS2019 and Edge-IIoTset datasets. The simulation results validated the superiority of the proposed approach, and thus, demonstrated significant improvements in both detection accuracy and convergence.

25 July 2025 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
ZCZhigang Cao
Zhigang Cao
HZHantao Zhao
Hantao Zhao
YWYunfan Wang
Yunfan Wang
CHChuan He
Chuan He
DZDing Zhou
Ding Zhou
XHXiaopeng Han
Xiaopeng Han
As cyber threats continue to grow in complexity and persistence, resilience has become a critical requirement for cyber–physical systems (CPSs). Resilience quantitative assessment is essential for supporting secure system design and ensuring reliable operation. Although various methods have been proposed for evaluating CPS resilience, major challenges remain in accurately modeling the interaction between cyber and physical domains and in providing structured guidance for resilience-oriented design. This study proposes an integrated CPS resilience assessment framework that combines cyber-layer anomaly modeling based on Markov chains with mathematical modeling of performance degradation and recovery in the physical domain. The framework establishes a structured evaluation process through parameter normalization and cyber–physical coupling, enabling the generation of resilience curves that clearly represent system performance changes under adverse conditions. A case study involving an industrial controller equipped with a diversity-redundancy architecture is conducted to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method. Modeling and simulation results indicate that the framework effectively reveals key resilience characteristics and supports performance-informed design optimization.

16 June 2025 in Electronics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
XHXiaopeng Han
Xiaopeng Han
YNYukun Niu
Yukun Niu
ZCZhigang Cao
Zhigang Cao
DZDing Zhou
Ding Zhou
BLBo Liu
Bo Liu
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are increasingly targeted by sophisticated and evolving cyberattacks, while conventional static defense mechanisms and isolated intrusion detection models often lack the robustness required to cope with such dynamic threats. To overcome these limitations, we propose RHAD (Reinforced Heterogeneous Anomaly Detector), a resilient and adaptive anomaly detection framework specifically designed for ICS environments. RHAD combines a heterogeneous ensemble of detection models with a confidence-aware scheduling mechanism guided by reinforcement learning (RL), alongside a time-decaying sliding window voting strategy to enhance detection accuracy and temporal robustness. The proposed architecture establishes a modular collaborative framework that enables dynamic and fine-grained protection for industrial network traffic. At its core, the RL-based scheduler leverages the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm to dynamically assign model weights and orchestrate container-level executor replacement in real time, driven by network state observations and runtime performance feedback. We evaluate RHAD using two publicly available ICS datasets—SCADA and WDT—achieving 99.19% accuracy with an F1-score of 0.989 on SCADA, and 98.35% accuracy with an F1-score of 0.987 on WDT. These results significantly outperform state-of-the-art deep learning baselines, confirming RHAD’s robustness under class imbalance conditions. Thus, RHAD provides a promising foundation for resilient ICS security and shows strong potential for broader deployment in cyber-physical systems.


1 January 2025 in International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
DZDing Zhou
Ding Zhou
LHLei He
Lei He
ZCZhigang Cao
Zhigang Cao
AZAn Zhang
An Zhang
XHXiaopeng Han
Xiaopeng Han
This study is devoted to the resilient control problem of a mobile sensor network with a Sybil attack and...

18 July 2025 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
YNYukun Niu
Yukun Niu
XHXiaopeng Han
Xiaopeng Han
CHChuan He
Chuan He
YWYunfan Wang
Yunfan Wang
ZCZhigang Cao
Zhigang Cao
DZDing Zhou
Ding Zhou
Cloud–edge collaboration industrial control systems (ICSs) face critical security and privacy challenges that existing dynamic heterogeneous redundancy (DHR) architectures inadequately address due to two fundamental limitations: event-triggered scheduling approaches that amplify common-mode escape impacts in resource-constrained environments, and insufficient privacy-preserving arbitration mechanisms for sensitive industrial data processing. In contrast to existing work that treats scheduling and privacy as separate concerns, this paper proposes a unified polymorphic heterogeneous security architecture that integrates hybrid event–time triggered scheduling with adaptive privacy-preserving arbitration, specifically designed to address the unique challenges of cloud–edge collaboration ICSs where both security resilience and privacy preservation are paramount requirements. The architecture introduces three key innovations: (1) a hybrid event–time triggered scheduling algorithm with credibility assessment and heterogeneity metrics to mitigate common-mode escape scenarios, (2) an adaptive privacy budget allocation mechanism that balances privacy protection effectiveness with system availability based on attack activity levels, and (3) a unified framework that organically integrates privacy-preserving arbitration with heterogeneous redundancy management. Comprehensive evaluations using natural gas pipeline pressure control and smart grid voltage control systems demonstrate superior performance: the proposed method achieves 100% system availability compared to 62.57% for static redundancy and 86.53% for moving target defense, maintains 99.98% availability even under common-mode attacks (10−2 probability), and consistently outperforms moving target defense methods integrated with state-of-the-art detection mechanisms (99.7790% and 99.6735% average availability when false data deviations from true values are 5% and 3%, respectively) across different attack detection scenarios, validating its effectiveness in defending against availability attacks and privacy leakage threats in cloud–edge collaboration environments.