Aymen Bouferroum

Aymen Bouferroum, Valeria Loscri, Abderrahim Benslimane

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) introduces significant security challenges as resource-constrained devices become increasingly integrated into critical industrial processes. Existing security approaches typically address threats at a single network layer, often relying on expensive hardware and remaining confined to simulation environments. In this paper, we present the research framework and contributions of our doctoral thesis, which aims to develop a lightweight, Machine Learning (ML)-based security framework for IIoT environments. We first describe our adoption of the Tm-IIoT trust model and the Hybrid IIoT (H-IIoT) architecture as foundational baselines, then introduce the Trust Convergence Acceleration (TCA) approach, our primary contribution that integrates ML to predict and mitigate the impact of degraded network conditions on trust convergence, achieving up to a 28.6% reduction in convergence time while maintaining robustness against adversarial behaviors. We then propose a real-world deployment architecture based on affordable, open-source hardware, designed to implement and extend the security framework. Finally, we outline our ongoing research toward multi-layer attack detection, including physical-layer threat identification and considerations for robustness against adversarial ML attacks.

Aymen Bouferroum, Ildi Alla, Valeria Loscri et al.

Radio frequency jamming poses a critical threat to the availability of wireless Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks. Existing detection and classification techniques are poorly suited to this setting: coarse signal-strength and cross-layer features lack information richness, while raw I/Q baseband approaches require hardware and throughput that is impractical at the scale of hundred-node IIoT deployments. This paper presents CITADEL, a lightweight two-stage hierarchical pipeline that uses only Channel State Information (CSI) measurements, which are natively available on commodity IIoT devices, to detect and classify jamming attacks including previously unseen ones. While prior work has shown that jamming leaves observable CSI signatures, CITADEL is the first system to translate this insight into an end-to-end pipeline that jointly achieves closed-set classification of known attacks, open-set detection of zero-day attacks, and resistance to adversarial evasion. Evaluated across 6 known attack types and 15 zero-day scenarios, CITADEL achieves 100% known-attack detection and 97.1% zero-day detection at a 0.4% end-to-end false positive rate. Under adversarial evaluation spanning white-box and black-box threat models, gradient-based evasion remains below 2% across all tested perturbation budgets and the strongest published CSI attack generator achieves less than 5% average evasion. A systematic comparison against eight baselines confirms that no existing method achieves comparable performance on CSI data across all three axes: detection, generalization, and robustness. The full pipeline completes inference in 14.2 ms at 95.9 mJ on an edge GPU, establishing CITADEL as a practical solution for large-scale IIoT network security.

Aymen Bouferroum, Valeria Loscri, Abderrahim Benslimane

In Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments, trust management plays a vital role in securing systems, especially when dealing with resource-constrained devices. Traditional trust models often overlook the impact of fluctuating network quality, leading to slower trust convergence and inaccurate assessments. In this paper, we propose a dynamic trust management solution, known as the Trust Convergence Acceleration (TCA) approach, which integrates Machine Learning (ML) to accelerate trust convergence under poor network conditions. Our model predicts the number of time units needed for trust convergence based on key network metrics and dynamically adapts transition probabilities in the trust model to enhance convergence speed. Using a simulation framework that incorporates realistic Wi-Fi channel conditions based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the TCA-based approach, achieving up to a 28.6% reduction in trust convergence time under challenging conditions. Furthermore, the proposed solution exhibits resilience in scenarios involving malicious nodes, improving trust evaluation accuracy. This work provides a scalable and adaptive trust framework for IIoT systems in dynamic industrial environments, ensuring robust performance under varying network conditions.