Explainable and perturbation-resilient model for cyber-threat detection in industrial control systems Networks

Abstract

Deep learning-based intrusion detection systems (DL-IDS) have proven effective in detecting cyber threats. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks and environmental noise, particularly in industrial settings, limits practical application. Current IDS models often assume ideal conditions, overlooking noise and adversarial manipulations, leading to degraded performance when deployed in real-world environments. Additionally, the black-box nature of DL model complicates decision-making, especially in industrial control systems (ICS) network, where understanding model behavior is crucial. This paper introduces the eXplainable Cyber-Threat Detection Framework (XC-TDF), a novel solution designed to overcome these challenges. XC-TDF enhances robustness against noise and adversarial attacks using regularization and adversarial training respectively, and also improves transparency through an eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) module. Simulation results demonstrate its effectiveness, showing resilience to perturbation by achieving commendable accuracy of 100% and 99.4% on the Wustl-IIoT2021 and Edge-IIoT datasets, respectively.