AquaSense-ICS: A Hybrid Real-Simulated Cyber-Physical Dataset and Leakage-Aware Benchmark for Smart Water Quality Monitoring and Attack Detection

Abstract

Machine-learning research on water cyber-physical systems (CPS) is constrained by datasets that are either real but chemicallypoor, or simulated but free of sensing noise and attacks. We present AquaSense-ICS, an open dataset and benchmark that co-registers (i) a 25.4 h recording window (8.0 h of recorded data, 26% coverage) from a Raspberry Pi 5 edge node (TDS probe andBME680 ambient sensor, 1–2 s sampling, 23,688 records), with (ii) a looped network of 13 nodes (10 junctions, 2 reservoirs, 1tank) simulated in EPANET-MSX for six water-quality species, (iii) a parameterised library of cyber-attacks (false data injection,replay, denial of service, drift) and unintentional sensor faults with sample-level ground truth, and (iv) augmented and TimeGAN-generated sequences, flagged by an origin column. The attack, fault and water-quality labels are traceable to a seeded generator,a documented rule or a simulation input. We show that the most common way of benchmarking such hybrid data, random rowsplits and labels computed from the input features, yields near-perfect but uninformative scores (macro-F1 = 0.9998 for RandomForest), and we replace it with a leakage-aware protocol using chronological splits and held-out attack types rather than labelreconstruction. Under this protocol, no model exceeds the constant “normal” predictor for attack classification (macro-F1 = 0.465),and the best detectors reach a mean AUROC of 0.64 on attack types unseen during training (0.35–0.93 depending on the type),leaving substantial headroom. Data and simulation files are released under CC BY 4.0 at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23390541, and attack generators and benchmark code under MIT.