Industrial control systems are critical to the operation of industrial
facilities, especially for critical infrastructures, such as refineries, power
grids, and transportation systems. Similar to other information systems, a
significant threat to industrial control systems is the attack from
cyberspace---the offensive maneuvers launched by "anonymous" in the digital
world that target computer-based assets with the goal of compromising a
system's functions or probing for information. Owing to the importance of
industrial control systems, and the possibly devastating consequences of being
attacked, significant endeavors have been attempted to secure industrial
control systems from cyberattacks. Among them are intrusion detection systems
that serve as the first line of defense by monitoring and reporting potentially
malicious activities. Classical machine-learning-based intrusion detection
methods usually generate prediction models by learning modest-sized training
samples all at once. Such approach is not always applicable to industrial
control systems, as industrial control systems must process continuous control
commands with limited computational resources in a nonstop way. To satisfy such
requirements, we propose using online learning to learn prediction models from
the controlling data stream. We introduce several state-of-the-art online
learning algorithms categorically, and illustrate their efficacies on two
typically used testbeds---power system and gas pipeline. Further, we explore a
new cost-sensitive online learning algorithm to solve the class-imbalance
problem that is pervasive in industrial intrusion detection systems. Our
experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can achieve an
overall improvement in the detection rate of cyberattacks in industrial control
systems.