Security Defense Architecture for Wireless Industrial Control Systems (Image by the research group)

Cyber-Control-Physical Cross-Domain Collaborative Architecture (Image by the research group)

Wireless technology has endowed industrial control systems with greater flexibility. However, the open transmission environment, complex on-site interference, and limited communication resources have also brought more uncertainties to the operation of industrial control systems. How to continuously enhance the operational security of wireless industrial control systems has become a key focus for researchers.

Recently, a research team led by Researcher Wei Liang from the Industrial Control Network and System Research Department of the Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has developed an integrated cyber-control-physical cross-domain collaborative security architecture for wireless industrial control systems.

The research team subdivided the traditionally broad information domain into a narrow information domain and a control domain. This subdivision facilitates more targeted implementation of security measures and management based on domain-specific knowledge, thereby reducing the overall security overhead of industrial wireless systems and improving the efficiency of security strategy implementation and response.

On the basis of security protection in the information domain and control domain, the research team innovatively integrated a physical domain behavior whitelist, taking into account the finiteness of the feature space in the physical domain—such as the production processes of industrial systems and the set of physical behaviors of manufacturing equipment. By strictly guarding the security threshold through abnormal behavior detection, the physical domain can achieve timely braking once a risk occurs. This effectively controls the impact of attacks on the physical system and prevents the occurrence of security accidents.

The research team analyzed and constructed a diffusion model for cross-domain attacks on physical systems, and designed a top-down security defense mechanism and a bottom-up collaborative risk traceability strategy for this model. This further improves the accuracy of defense, avoids the problem of high false alarm rates in separate detection of each domain, and realizes the rapid traceability, localization, repair, and optimization of the causes of security risks.

They also proposed an integrated security performance evaluation system suitable for wireless industrial control systems. Experiments and tests on the proposed framework were conducted in a typical workshop AGV scheduling and control system, verifying the effectiveness of the technical architecture and the feasibility of meeting industrial application indicators.

The above research was published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications under the title An Integrated Security-Safety Architecture for Industrial Wireless Control System Based on Cyber-Control-Physical Cross-Domain Collaboration. The first author of this paper is Researcher Wei Liang, and the corresponding authors are Researcher Wei Liang and Associate Researcher Jialin Zhang.

DOI: 10.1109/JSAC.2025.3574615

Paper Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11016837