Information-Theoretic Digital Twins for Stealthy Attack Detection in Industrial Control Systems: A Closed-Form KL Divergence Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kreso, Inda, Tarif, Mehran, Moradi, Fatemeh, Khazrak, Iman, Rezaee, Mostafa M, Homaei, Mohammadhossein
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kreso, Inda
Tarif, Mehran
Moradi, Fatemeh
Khazrak, Iman
Rezaee, Mostafa M
Homaei, Mohammadhossein
author_facet Kreso, Inda
Tarif, Mehran
Moradi, Fatemeh
Khazrak, Iman
Rezaee, Mostafa M
Homaei, Mohammadhossein
contents Digital twins (DTs) are increasingly used to monitor and secure Industrial Control Systems (ICS), yet detecting stealthy False Data Injection Attacks (FDIAs) that manipulate system states within normal physical bounds remains challenging. Deep learning anomaly detectors often over-generalize such subtle manipulations, while classical fault detection methods do not scale well in highly correlated multivariate systems. We propose a closed-loop Information-Theoretic Digital Twin (IT-DT) framework for real-time anomaly detection. N4SID identification is combined with steady-state Kalman filtering to quantify residual distribution shifts via closed-form KL divergence, capturing both mean deviations and malicious cross-covariance shifts. Evaluations on the SWaT and WADI datasets show that IT-DT achieves F1-scores of 0.832 and 0.615, respectively, with better precision than deep learning baselines such as TranAD. Computational profiling indicates that the analytical approach requires minimal memory and provides approximately a 600x inference speedup over transformer-based methods on CPU hardware. This makes the framework suitable for resource-constrained industrial edge controllers without GPU acceleration.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_01621
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
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spellingShingle Information-Theoretic Digital Twins for Stealthy Attack Detection in Industrial Control Systems: A Closed-Form KL Divergence Approach
Kreso, Inda
Tarif, Mehran
Moradi, Fatemeh
Khazrak, Iman
Rezaee, Mostafa M
Homaei, Mohammadhossein
Cryptography and Security
Optimization and Control
Digital twins (DTs) are increasingly used to monitor and secure Industrial Control Systems (ICS), yet detecting stealthy False Data Injection Attacks (FDIAs) that manipulate system states within normal physical bounds remains challenging. Deep learning anomaly detectors often over-generalize such subtle manipulations, while classical fault detection methods do not scale well in highly correlated multivariate systems. We propose a closed-loop Information-Theoretic Digital Twin (IT-DT) framework for real-time anomaly detection. N4SID identification is combined with steady-state Kalman filtering to quantify residual distribution shifts via closed-form KL divergence, capturing both mean deviations and malicious cross-covariance shifts. Evaluations on the SWaT and WADI datasets show that IT-DT achieves F1-scores of 0.832 and 0.615, respectively, with better precision than deep learning baselines such as TranAD. Computational profiling indicates that the analytical approach requires minimal memory and provides approximately a 600x inference speedup over transformer-based methods on CPU hardware. This makes the framework suitable for resource-constrained industrial edge controllers without GPU acceleration.
title Information-Theoretic Digital Twins for Stealthy Attack Detection in Industrial Control Systems: A Closed-Form KL Divergence Approach
topic Cryptography and Security
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01621