Detecting Attacks on a Water Treatment System Using Oneclass Support Vector Machines

Abstract

Critical infrastructure assets such as power grids and water treatment plants are monitored and managed by industrial control systems. Attacks that leverage industrial control systems to disrupt or damage infrastructure assets can impact human lives, the economy and the environment. Several attack detection methods have been proposed, but they are often difficult to implement and their accuracy is often low. Additionally, these methods do not consider the digital forensic aspects. This chapter focuses on the use of machine learning, specifically one-class support vector machines, for attack detection and forensic investigations. The methodology is evaluated using a water treatment testbed, a scaled-down version of a real-world industrial water treatment plant. Data collected under normal operations and attacks are used in the study. In order to enhance detection accuracy, the water treatment process is divided into sub-processes for individual one-class support vector machine model training. The experimental results demonstrate that the trained sub-process models yield better detection performance than the trained complete process model. Additionally, the approach enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of forensic investigations.