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Main Authors: Ha, Song Son, Singh, Kunal, Foerster, Florian, Beuster, Henry, Kittel, Tim, Merli, Dominik, Scholl, Gerd
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23416
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author Ha, Song Son
Singh, Kunal
Foerster, Florian
Beuster, Henry
Kittel, Tim
Merli, Dominik
Scholl, Gerd
author_facet Ha, Song Son
Singh, Kunal
Foerster, Florian
Beuster, Henry
Kittel, Tim
Merli, Dominik
Scholl, Gerd
contents Industrial deployments increasingly rely on Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) as a secure and platform-independent communication protocol, while private Fifth Generation (5G) networks provide low-latency and high-reliability connectivity for modern automation systems. However, their combination introduces new attack surfaces and traffic characteristics that remain insufficiently understood, particularly with respect to machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (ML-based IDS). This paper presents an experimental study on detecting cyberattacks against OPC UA applications operating over an operational private 5G network. Multiple attack scenarios are executed, and OPC UA traffic is captured and enriched with statistical flow-, packet-, and protocol-aware features. Several supervised ML models are trained and evaluated to distinguish benign and malicious traffic. The results demonstrate that the proposed ML-based IDS achieves high detection performance for a representative set of OPC UA-specific attack scenarios over an operational private 5G network.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_23416
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Experimental Study of Machine Learning-Based Intrusion Detection for OPC UA over Industrial Private 5G Networks
Ha, Song Son
Singh, Kunal
Foerster, Florian
Beuster, Henry
Kittel, Tim
Merli, Dominik
Scholl, Gerd
Cryptography and Security
Industrial deployments increasingly rely on Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) as a secure and platform-independent communication protocol, while private Fifth Generation (5G) networks provide low-latency and high-reliability connectivity for modern automation systems. However, their combination introduces new attack surfaces and traffic characteristics that remain insufficiently understood, particularly with respect to machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (ML-based IDS). This paper presents an experimental study on detecting cyberattacks against OPC UA applications operating over an operational private 5G network. Multiple attack scenarios are executed, and OPC UA traffic is captured and enriched with statistical flow-, packet-, and protocol-aware features. Several supervised ML models are trained and evaluated to distinguish benign and malicious traffic. The results demonstrate that the proposed ML-based IDS achieves high detection performance for a representative set of OPC UA-specific attack scenarios over an operational private 5G network.
title An Experimental Study of Machine Learning-Based Intrusion Detection for OPC UA over Industrial Private 5G Networks
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23416