Journal Article

A Privacy-Preserving Polymorphic Heterogeneous Security Architecture for Cloud–Edge Collaboration Industrial Control Systems

He, Chuan, Wang, Yunfan, Zhou, Ding, Han, Xiaopeng, Cao, Zhigang, Niu, Yukun

2025

Overview

Cloud–edge collaboration industrial control systems (ICSs) face critical security and privacy challenges that existing dynamic heterogeneous redundancy (DHR) architectures inadequately address due to two fundamental limitations: event-triggered scheduling approaches that amplify common-mode escape impacts in resource-constrained environments, and insufficient privacy-preserving arbitration mechanisms for sensitive industrial data processing. In contrast to existing work that treats scheduling and privacy as separate concerns, this paper proposes a unified polymorphic heterogeneous security architecture that integrates hybrid event–time triggered scheduling with adaptive privacy-preserving arbitration, specifically designed to address the unique challenges of cloud–edge collaboration ICSs where both security resilience and privacy preservation are paramount requirements. The architecture introduces three key innovations: (1) a hybrid event–time triggered scheduling algorithm with credibility assessment and heterogeneity metrics to mitigate common-mode escape scenarios, (2) an adaptive privacy budget allocation mechanism that balances privacy protection effectiveness with system availability based on attack activity levels, and (3) a unified framework that organically integrates privacy-preserving arbitration with heterogeneous redundancy management. Comprehensive evaluations using natural gas pipeline pressure control and smart grid voltage control systems demonstrate superior performance: the proposed method achieves 100% system availability compared to 62.57% for static redundancy and 86.53% for moving target defense, maintains 99.98% availability even under common-mode attacks (10−2 probability), and consistently outperforms moving target defense methods integrated with state-of-the-art detection mechanisms (99.7790% and 99.6735% average availability when false data deviations from true values are 5% and 3%, respectively) across different attack detection scenarios, validating its effectiveness in defending against availability attacks and privacy leakage threats in cloud–edge collaboration environments.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: Algorithms / Arbitration / Automation / Cloud computing / cloud–edge collaboration / Collaboration / Communication / Confidentiality / Control algorithms / Control systems / Data processing / Defense mechanisms / dynamic heterogeneous redundancy / hybrid scheduling strategy / industrial control systems / Industrial equipment / Industrial espionage / Manufacturing / Neural networks / Physical instruments / Privacy / privacy-preserving arbitration / Software