Daily Papers

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a transformative paradigm that integrates smart sensors, advanced analytics, and robust connectivity within industrial processes, enabling real-time data-driven decision-making and enhancing operational efficiency across diverse sectors, including manufacturing, energy, and logistics. IIoT is susceptible to various attack vectors, with Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) posing a particularly grave concern due to their stealthy, prolonged, and targeted nature. The effectiveness of machine learning-based intrusion detection systems in APT detection has been documented in the literature. However, existing cybersecurity datasets often lack crucial attributes for APT detection in IIoT environments. Incorporating insights from prior research on APT detection using provenance data and intrusion detection within IoT systems, we present the CICAPT-IIoT dataset. The main goal of this paper is to propose a novel APT dataset in the IIoT setting that includes essential information for the APT detection task. In order to achieve this, a testbed for IIoT is developed, and over 20 attack techniques frequently used in APT campaigns are included. The performed attacks create some of the invariant phases of the APT cycle, including Data Collection and Exfiltration, Discovery and Lateral Movement, Defense Evasion, and Persistence. By integrating network logs and provenance logs with detailed attack information, the CICAPT-IIoT dataset presents foundation for developing holistic cybersecurity measures. Additionally, a comprehensive dataset analysis is provided, presenting cybersecurity experts with a strong basis on which to build innovative and efficient security solutions.

In the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), condition monitoring sensor signals from complex systems often exhibit nonlinear and stochastic spatial-temporal dynamics under varying conditions. These complex dynamics make fault detection particularly challenging. While previous methods effectively model these dynamics, they often neglect the evolution of relationships between sensor signals. Undetected shifts in these relationships can lead to significant system failures. Furthermore, these methods frequently misidentify novel operating conditions as faults. Addressing these limitations, we propose DyEdgeGAT (Dynamic Edge via Graph Attention), a novel approach for early-stage fault detection in IIoT systems. DyEdgeGAT's primary innovation lies in a novel graph inference scheme for multivariate time series that tracks the evolution of relationships between time series, enabled by dynamic edge construction. Another key innovation of DyEdgeGAT is its ability to incorporate operating condition contexts into node dynamics modeling, enhancing its accuracy and robustness. We rigorously evaluated DyEdgeGAT using both a synthetic dataset, simulating varying levels of fault severity, and a real-world industrial-scale multiphase flow facility benchmark with diverse fault types under varying operating conditions and detection complexities. The results show that DyEdgeGAT significantly outperforms other baseline methods in fault detection, particularly in the early stages with low severity, and exhibits robust performance under novel operating conditions.

Lightweight machine learning models are increasingly proposed for intrusion detection in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks due to their suitability for resource-constrained edge deployment. Most reported results evaluate these models only within their training network, leaving behavior on unseen networks unverified. This study trains four lightweight architectures on one IIoT dataset and evaluates them, without retraining, on two structurally distinct IIoT datasets using a feature representation restricted to attributes available across all three sources. Explainability analysis across two top-performing models shows both rely overwhelmingly on coarse port-category features; the most influential category occurs in source-domain attack traffic at 96 to 435 times the rate in the two target domains, indicating that coarsening port resolution relocates rather than removes a documented shortcut. Evaluation under naturally imbalanced class distributions reveals a further effect: the evaluation protocol used can reverse which target network appears to pose the greater generalization challenge. Adversarial robustness and recovery through limited target-domain exposure are also assessed; robustness to adversarial perturbation is unrelated to cross-network generalization, and recovery through adaptation varies considerably by architecture. These findings suggest deployment readiness should be assessed using cross-network evaluation under realistic class distributions, rather than within-domain accuracy alone.

The Internet of Things has expanded rapidly, transforming communication and operations across industries but also increasing the attack surface and security breaches. Artificial Intelligence plays a key role in securing IoT, enabling attack detection, attack behavior analysis, and mitigation suggestion. Despite advancements, evaluations remain purely qualitative, and the lack of a standardized, objective benchmark for quantitatively measuring AI-based attack analysis and mitigation hinders consistent assessment of model effectiveness. In this work, we propose a hybrid framework combining Machine Learning (ML) for multi-class attack detection with Large Language Models (LLMs) for attack behavior analysis and mitigation suggestion. After benchmarking several ML and Deep Learning (DL) classifiers on the Edge-IIoTset and CICIoT2023 datasets, we applied structured role-play prompt engineering with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to guide ChatGPT-o3 and DeepSeek-R1 in producing detailed, context-aware responses. We introduce novel evaluation metrics for quantitative assessment to guide us and an ensemble of judge LLMs, namely ChatGPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, Mixtral 8x7B Instruct, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Meta Llama 4, TII Falcon H1 34B Instruct, xAI Grok 3, and Claude 4 Sonnet, to independently evaluate the responses. Results show that Random Forest has the best detection model, and ChatGPT-o3 outperformed DeepSeek-R1 in attack analysis and mitigation.

Machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) are critical for securing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments. Most adversarial research against them perturbs the feature vector or the traffic that produces it, and depends on gradient access, repeated model queries, or a learned model of benign traffic. A smaller line of work reshapes packet timing without querying the detector, but makes malicious traffic mimic a learned model of benign timing. Across these approaches, one assumption of industrial monitoring pipelines has received little attention: temporal synchronization. An IDS reconstructs operational state by aggregating telemetry into sliding or tumbling windows, so its view depends not only on what is observed but on when each observation falls relative to a window boundary. We introduce the Phantom State Attack (PSA), which exploits that dependence under a passive, zero-query threat model. Rather than modifying packets, perturbing features, querying the classifier, or fitting any model of benign traffic, PSA injects bounded timing drift calibrated to the attack flow's own inter-arrival variability, moving observations across the nearest window boundary by the minimal shift needed. The IDS then reconstructs a phantom state that diverges from the true process state. We evaluate PSA on ToN-IoT and CIC IIoT 2025 (DataSense), against Random Forest, MLP and XGBoost, measuring detection degradation, synchronization distortion, stealth, and attacker cost. PSA degrades detection on flows carrying enough packets for window-boundary redistribution, and leaves others almost unchanged, so its effect is conditional. A query-based baseline reaches higher raw success but needs many queries per window, while PSA needs none. The results identify temporal aggregation as an attack surface reachable under weaker assumptions than prior evasion techniques.