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Abstract
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) manage critical infrastructures like power
grids and water treatment plants. Cyberattacks on ICSs can disrupt operations,
causing severe economic, environmental, and safety issues. For example,
undetected pollution in a water plant can put the lives of thousands at stake.
ICS researchers have increasingly turned to honeypots -- decoy systems designed
to attract attackers, study their behaviors, and eventually improve defensive
mechanisms. However, existing ICS honeypots struggle to replicate the ICS
physical process, making them susceptible to detection. Accurately simulating
the noise in ICS physical processes is challenging because different factors
produce it, including sensor imperfections and external interferences.
In this paper, we propose SimProcess, a novel framework to rank the fidelity
of ICS simulations by evaluating how closely they resemble real-world and noisy
physical processes. It measures the simulation distance from a target system by
estimating the noise distribution with machine learning models like Random
Forest. Unlike existing solutions that require detailed mathematical models or
are limited to simple systems, SimProcess operates with only a timeseries of
measurements from the real system, making it applicable to a broader range of
complex dynamic systems. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness through a
case study using real-world power grid data from the EPIC testbed. We compare
the performance of various simulation methods, including static and generative
noise techniques. Our model correctly classifies real samples with a recall of
up to 1.0. It also identifies Gaussian and Gaussian Mixture as the best
distribution to simulate our power systems, together with a generative solution
provided by an autoencoder, thereby helping developers to improve honeypot
fidelity. Additionally, we make our code publicly available.