A systems and control perspective of CPS security

Abstract

The comprehensive integration of instrumentation, communication, and control into physical systems has led to the study of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), a field that has recently garnered increased attention. A key concern that is ubiquitous in CPS is a need to ensure security in the face of cyber attacks. In this paper, we carry out a survey of systems and control methods that have been proposed for the security of CPS. We classify these methods into three categories based on the type of defense proposed against the cyberattacks: prevention, resilience, and detection & isolation. A unified threat assessment metric is proposed in order to evaluate how CPS security is achieved in each of these three cases. Also surveyed are risk assessment tools and the effect of network topology on CPS security. An emphasis has been placed on power and transportation applications in the overall survey. Index Terms-cyber-physical systems, resilient control I. INTRODUCTION Motivated by concerns about sustainability, efficiency, and resiliency, several sectors including energy, transportation, water, and healthcare systems have witnessed significant advances in instrumentation, monitoring, and automation over the past decade. The resulting integration of information, communication, and computation with physically engineered systems demands a detailed investigation into the analysis and synthesis of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) so as to realize the desired performance metrics of efficiency, sustainability, and safety. The extensive and intricate presence of cyber components also introduces a vulnerability of unwanted access to these systems. The available communication technologies, referred to as SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), are witnessing significant advances, triggering a shift from protected, closed, and wired networks to open and wireless networks which, as a side effect, are more vulnerable to outside interference.

Detection of Covert Cyber-Attacks in Interconnected Systems: A Distributed Model-Based Approach

“…Proposition 3: Let the ith subsystem be under the attack modeled in (5) and (2) and Assumption 3 hold. The actual estimation error dynamics for observer (16)…”

“…Proof: The proof is readily obtained by combining the observer formulation (16) with the attacker model in (2) and (3). Since (22) and (20) are identical, the attack is covert.…”

“…cyber-attacks [5], as they are typically carried out by intelligent and active agents. This difficulty has inspired a large stream of research efforts (see, for example the seminal works [6]- [11], the more recent ones [12]- [14], and the surveys [15], [16], as well as the references cited therein).…”

(Deep) Reinforcement learning for electric power system control and related problems: A short review and perspectives

“…An important aspect is cyber-security since cyber attacks can make best designed controls to malfunction or degrade their performances. Several works dealt with this problem [80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88]. Reference [80] considered cyber-physical systems security from systems and control perspective in general, and shortly discussed possibilities to use RL and DRL to this purpose.…”

“…Several works dealt with this problem [80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88]. Reference [80] considered cyber-physical systems security from systems and control perspective in general, and shortly discussed possibilities to use RL and DRL to this purpose. Q-learning was proposed in [81] to analyze the transmission grid vulnerability under sequential topology attacks and identify critical attack sequences with consideration of physical system behaviors.…”