Enhancing Network Security Management in Water Systems using FM-based Attack Attribution

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Avdalovic, Aleksandar, Khoury, Joseph, Taha, Ahmad, Bou-Harb, Elias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912255967232000
author Avdalovic, Aleksandar
Khoury, Joseph
Taha, Ahmad
Bou-Harb, Elias
author_facet Avdalovic, Aleksandar
Khoury, Joseph
Taha, Ahmad
Bou-Harb, Elias
contents Water systems are vital components of modern infrastructure, yet they are increasingly susceptible to sophisticated cyber attacks with potentially dire consequences on public health and safety. While state-of-the-art machine learning techniques effectively detect anomalies, contemporary model-agnostic attack attribution methods using LIME, SHAP, and LEMNA are deemed impractical for large-scale, interdependent water systems. This is due to the intricate interconnectivity and dynamic interactions that define these complex environments. Such methods primarily emphasize individual feature importance while falling short of addressing the crucial sensor-actuator interactions in water systems, which limits their effectiveness in identifying root cause attacks. To this end, we propose a novel model-agnostic Factorization Machines (FM)-based approach that capitalizes on water system sensor-actuator interactions to provide granular explanations and attributions for cyber attacks. For instance, an anomaly in an actuator pump activity can be attributed to a top root cause attack candidates, a list of water pressure sensors, which is derived from the underlying linear and quadratic effects captured by our approach. We validate our method using two real-world water system specific datasets, SWaT and WADI, demonstrating its superior performance over traditional attribution methods. In multi-feature cyber attack scenarios involving intricate sensor-actuator interactions, our FM-based attack attribution method effectively ranks attack root causes, achieving approximately 20% average improvement over SHAP and LEMNA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_01229
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Network Security Management in Water Systems using FM-based Attack Attribution
Avdalovic, Aleksandar
Khoury, Joseph
Taha, Ahmad
Bou-Harb, Elias
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Systems and Control
Water systems are vital components of modern infrastructure, yet they are increasingly susceptible to sophisticated cyber attacks with potentially dire consequences on public health and safety. While state-of-the-art machine learning techniques effectively detect anomalies, contemporary model-agnostic attack attribution methods using LIME, SHAP, and LEMNA are deemed impractical for large-scale, interdependent water systems. This is due to the intricate interconnectivity and dynamic interactions that define these complex environments. Such methods primarily emphasize individual feature importance while falling short of addressing the crucial sensor-actuator interactions in water systems, which limits their effectiveness in identifying root cause attacks. To this end, we propose a novel model-agnostic Factorization Machines (FM)-based approach that capitalizes on water system sensor-actuator interactions to provide granular explanations and attributions for cyber attacks. For instance, an anomaly in an actuator pump activity can be attributed to a top root cause attack candidates, a list of water pressure sensors, which is derived from the underlying linear and quadratic effects captured by our approach. We validate our method using two real-world water system specific datasets, SWaT and WADI, demonstrating its superior performance over traditional attribution methods. In multi-feature cyber attack scenarios involving intricate sensor-actuator interactions, our FM-based attack attribution method effectively ranks attack root causes, achieving approximately 20% average improvement over SHAP and LEMNA.
title Enhancing Network Security Management in Water Systems using FM-based Attack Attribution
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01229