Bio-inspired Active System Identification: a Cyber-Physical Intelligence Attack in Networked Control Systems

Identification of Data Injection Attacks in Networked Control Systems Using Noise Impulse Integration

“…A vast collection of scientific literature about cybersecurity in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) is available, reporting security breaches in all major Real-Time Ethernet (RTE) protocols used in industry [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Therefore, considering the feasibility of occurring cyber-attacks against physical systems, as demonstrated by the real cases already reported in the literature [7,14,17], studies have been conducted aiming to characterize vulnerabilities and promote security solutions for NCSs [8,12,13,15,16,29].…”

“…The author assumes that the attacker knows the plant model, but does not describe how the model is obtained. More recent works [8,13] demonstrate that Service Degradation (SD)-Controlled Data Injection attacks can be accurately built based on the NCS models previously learned through system identification attacks [8,13]. The harmful effects that SD-Controlled Data Injection attacks can produce on physical plants motivate the research on mechanisms able to prevent them, as well as to detect/identify them when they occur.…”

“…It is possible to verify in the literature [7,8,12,13,15,16,21,22,26,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] that in cyber-physical systems (which includes NCSs), a relevant portion of the attack surface often lies in the communication process between sensors/actuators and controllers. For this reason, in the ICS cybersecurity landscape, significant attention has been given to the study of cyber-attacks to sensor/actuator systems [7].…”

“…The security of the communication between sensors, controllers and actuators may be compromised, for instance, if an attacker succeed in obtaining security keys or passwords (used for encryption and authentication) through social engineering attacks [41]. In this case, as shown in [8,13], an attacker can have the conditions required to implement an SD-Controlled Data Injection attack. Therefore, it is important to develop countermeasures able to detect and identify SD-Controlled Data Injection attacks in NCSs.…”

“…The possible applications for NCSs are broad and can range from non-critical industrial plants controlled by wireless networked control systems (WNCS) [9], to critical infrastructures controlled by wired NCSs, such as nuclear reactors [6,10,11] and water canal systems [12]. However, despite the several benefits provided by NCSs, the use of communication networks to integrate controllers and physical plants can also expose these systems to cyber threats [8,[12][13][14][15][16]. Indeed, the literature [7] reports the execution of real cyber-attacks against physical plants since 1982, affecting a wide variety of targets, such as a diesel generator, a gas pipeline, and a steel plant.…”