A Robust IDS-Driven Approach to Secure Industrial Control Systems from Emerging Cyber-Physical Attacks

CPS are critical for the operation of many infrastructures, such as ICS, energy, and transportation. However, increasingly interconnecting cyber with physical elements opens the floor for complicated cyber-physical attacks targeting severe operational disruption. This paper proposes an efficient approach, basically IDS-driven, for securing ICS against such advanced threats. A lightweight hybrid IDS is proposed for the efficient detection of known attacks as well as unknown zero-day attacks using supervised and unsupervised training models, respectively. The suggested IDS incorporates the LightGBM and Isolation Forest models for signature-based detection and anomaly-based detection, respectively. This will ensure that the threat detection is comprehensive in dynamic industrial environments with timely identification and response against both traditional and evolving cyber-physical threats. In our experimental results, the proposed H-IDS was evaluated using the NSL-KDD dataset and outperformed the traditional approaches in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall. Moreover, it will bring benefits like reduced false positive rates, speed, and resiliency. Some possible improvements that can be made in the future are also discussed in the paper, such as incorporating edge computing with federated learning, which can enhance capabilities for the proposed system in real-time environments