Counteracting New Attacks in CPS: A Few-Shot Class-Incremental Adaptation Strategy for Intrusion Detection System

Abstract

The deep integration of physical devices and communication networks has increased the security risks of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) compared to traditional control systems. Deep learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) play a crucial role in ensuring CPSs security. However, the existing IDSs often rely on known attack features, rendering them unable to withstand emerging new attacks arising from the dynamic evolution of intrusion behaviors. This paper aims to develop an IDSs with high adaptability and strong generalization capabilities, which is capable of rapidly adapting to new attack classes with only a few new samples. To achieve this objective, we propose CAT-IDS, a few-shot class-incremental adaptation strategy for an IDS to counteract new attacks on CPSs. We design a highly symmetric classifier structure for CAT-IDS that can flexibly adjust the classification space to adapt to new attacks. Furthermore, we calibrate the biased distribution formed by a few training samples through statistical feature transfer. In order to prevent the model from forgetting old attack information during the adaptation process, we devise hybrid features for attack detection. These features contain essential information for both old and new class classifications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CAT-IDS through multiple experiments on three CPSs datasets. The results show that CAT-IDS achieves an average accuracy improvement of approximately 4. 5% compared to the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its superior ability to adapt to new attacks while maintaining high performance in classifying existing attacks.