Explainable SCADA Hybrid IDS: Gaps and Hypothesis
2025 66th International Scientific Conference on Information Technology and Management Science of Riga Technical University (ITMS 2025): Proceedings 2025
Heinrihs Kristians Skrodelis, Andrejs Romānovs, Arnis Liekniņš

Industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks face increasing cyber risk as IT/OT convergence, remote access, and IIoT expand the attack surface. Signature-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) offer high precision on known threats but limited zero-day coverage, while anomaly-based IDS generalize to novel behaviors at the cost of false positives and opaque decisions. We hypothesize that an explainable hybrid IDS–running a signature engine in parallel with an ML-based anomaly detector, fusing alerts, and attaching operator-oriented explanations via explainable AI (XAI; e.g., SHAP values)—can improve operational usefulness. We outline a lightweight taxonomy, a reference pipeline, a qualitative gap matrix, and a concise evaluation plan designed to be testable on public ICS datasets. This positions a practical path toward higher coverage with actionable, human-centered alerts.


Keywords
Industrial control systems; SCADA; intrusion de-tection systems; hybrid detection; explainable artificial intelli-gence; Shapley values; anomaly detection (PDF) Explainable SCADA Hybrid IDS: Gaps and Hypothesis. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397694202_Explainable_SCADA_Hybrid_IDS_Gaps_and_Hypothesis [accessed Dec 11 2025].
DOI
10.1109/ITMS67030.2025.11236701
Hyperlink
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11236701

Skrodelis, H., Romānovs, A., Liekniņš, A. Explainable SCADA Hybrid IDS: Gaps and Hypothesis. In: 2025 66th International Scientific Conference on Information Technology and Management Science of Riga Technical University (ITMS 2025): Proceedings, Latvia, Riga, 9-10 October, 2025. Piscataway: IEEE, 2025, Article number 11236701. ISBN 979-8-3315-4529-1. e-ISBN 979-8-3315-4528-4. ISSN 2771-6953. e-ISSN 2771-6937. Available from: doi:10.1109/ITMS67030.2025.11236701

Publication language
English (en)
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