A Comparative Analysis of Emulated and Real IEC-104 Spontaneous Traffic in Power System Networks

Supervisory and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems control and monitor modern power networks. As attacks targeting SCADA systems are increasing, significant research is conducted to defend SCADA networks including variations of anomaly detection. Due to the sensitivity of real data, many defence mechanisms have been tested only in small testbeds or emulated traffic that were designed with assumptions on how SCADA systems behave. This work provides a timing characterization of IEC-104 spontaneous traffic and compares the results from emulated traffic and real traffic to verify if the network characteristics appearing in testbeds and emulated traffic coincide with real traffic. Among three verified characteristics, two of them appear in the real dataset but in a less regular way, and one does not appear in the collected real data. The insights from these observations are discussed in terms of presumed differences between emulated and real traffic and how those differences are generated.