Identification of Private ICS Protocols Based on Raw Traffic

Abstract

With the development of the Industrial Internet in recent years, security issues have been a hot topic of the industrial control system (ICS) network management. Identifying the protocol traffic in the communication process of the ICS is an important prerequisite to avoid security problems, especially in ICSs that use many private protocols. The private protocols cannot be analyzed due to the unknown internal structure of the protocols, which makes the ICS protocol identification work more difficult. However, the Internet-oriented protocol identification method is not applicable to the scenario of the private ICS protocols network environment. With this problem in mind, this paper proposes a method of ICS protocol identification based on the raw traffic payload. The method firstly performs data preprocessing such as data selection, interception, cleaning conversion, and labeling on the raw traffic of the protocol based on the characteristics of the industrial control protocol. Then it uses an AM-1DCNN + LSTM deep learning model to extract temporal and spatial features of the ICS raw traffic, and performs protocol identification. This method can effectively extract ICS protocol features in scenarios where protocol parsing is impossible compared with existing methods. We constructed a dataset for ICS protocol identification based on open-source data and tested the proposed method for experiments, and the identification accuracy rate reached 93%.

Keywords

• industrial control system
• raw traffic
• payload
• 1D-CNN
• LSTM