Protecting IEC 60870-5-104 ICS/SCADA Systems with Honeypots

Supervisory control and data acquisition systems are critical in Industry 4.0 for controlling and monitoring industrial processes. However, these systems are vulnerable to various attacks, and therefore, intelligent and robust intrusion detection systems as security tools are necessary for ensuring security. Machine learning‐based intrusion detection systems require datasets with balanced class distribution, but in practice, imbalanced class distribution is unavoidable. A dataset created by running a supervisory control and data acquisition IEC 60870‐5‐104 (IEC 104) protocol on a testbed network is presented. The dataset includes normal and attacks traffic data such as port scan, brute force, and Denial of service attacks. Various types of Denial of service attacks are generated to create a robust and specific dataset for training the intrusion detection system model. Three popular techniques for handling class imbalance, that is, random over‐sampling, random under‐sampling, and synthetic minority oversampling, are implemented to select the best dataset for the experiment. Gradient boosting, decision tree, and random forest algorithms are used as classifiers for the intrusion detection system models. Experimental results indicate that the intrusion detection system model using decision tree and random forest classifiers using random under‐sampling achieved the highest accuracy of 99.05%. The intrusion detection system model's performance is verified using various metrics such as recall, precision, F1‐Score, receiver operating characteristics curves, and area under the curve. Additionally, 10‐fold cross‐validation shows no indication of overfitting in the created intrusion detection system model.

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