Two-Phase Industrial Control System Anomaly Detection Using Communication Patterns and Deep Learning

Abstract

Several cases of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) attacks with zero-day vulnerabilities have been reported. To prevent these attacks, it is necessary to apply an abnormal behavior detection method; however, there are three main problems that make it hard. First, there are various industrial communication protocols. Instead of IT environments, many unstandardized protocols, which are usually defined by vendors, are used. Second, legacy devices are commonly used, not only EOS (End-of-service), but also EoL (End-of-Life). And last, the analysis of collected data is necessary for defining normal behavior. This behavior should be separately defined in each IIoT. Therefore, it is difficult to apply abnormal behavior detection in environments where economic and human investment is difficult. To solve these problems, we propose a deep learning based abnormal behavior detection technique that utilizes IIoT communication patterns. The proposed method uses a deep learning technique to train periodic data acquisition sequences, which is one of the common characteristics of IIoT. The trained model determined the sequence of packet is normal. The proposed technique can be applied without an additional analysis. The proposed method is expected to prevent security threats by proactively detecting cyberattacks. To verify the proposed method, a dataset was collected from the Korea Electric Power Control System. The model that defines normal behavior based on the application layer exhibits an accuracy of 79.6%. The other model, defining normal behavior based on the transport layer, has an accuracy of 80.9%. In these two models, most false positives and false negatives only occur when the abnormal packet is in a sequence.