Specification Mining for Intrusion Detection in Networked Control Systems

This paper discusses a novel approach to specification-based intrusion detection in the field of networked control systems. Our approach reduces the substantial human effort required to deploy a specification-based intrusion detection system by automating the development of its specification rules. We observe that networked control systems often include comprehensive documentation used by operators to manage their infrastructures. Our approach leverages the same documentation to automatically derive the specification rules and continuously monitor network traffic. In this paper, we implement this approach for BACnet-based building automation systems and test its effectiveness against two real infrastructures deployed at the University of Twente and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Our implementation successfully identifies process control mistakes and potentially dangerous misconfigurations. This confirms the need for an improved monitoring of networked control system infrastructures.