Relaxing Integrity Requirements for Attack-Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

The increase in network connectivity has also resulted in several high-profile attacks on cyber-physical systems. An attacker that manages to access a local network could remotely affect control performance by tampering with sensor measurements delivered to the controller. Recent results have shown that with network-based attacks, such as Man-in-the-Middle attacks, the attacker can introduce an unbounded state estimation error if measurements from a suitable subset of sensors contain false data when delivered to the controller. While these attacks can be addressed with the standard cryptographic tools that ensure data integrity, their continuous use would introduce significant communication and computation overhead. Consequently, we study effects of intermittent data integrity guarantees on system performance under stealthy attacks. We consider linear estimators equipped with a general type of residual-based intrusion detectors (including χ 2 and SPRT detectors), and show that even when integrity of sensor measurements is enforced only intermittently, the attack impact is significantly limited; specifically, the state estimation error is bounded or the attacker cannot remain stealthy. Furthermore, we present methods to:(1) evaluate the effects of any given integrity enforcement policy in terms of reachable state-estimation errors for any type of stealthy attacks, and (2) design an enforcement policy that provides the desired estimation error guarantees under attack. Finally, on three automotive case studies we show that even with less than 10% of authenticated messages we can ensure satisfiable control performance in the presence of attacks.

Predictive Formal Analysis of Resilience in Cyber-Physical Systems

“…In [30], the authors distinguish between the notions of information and infrastructure dependability, and clearly illustrate the need to formally model and reason about the dependability aspects of CPS applications. Jovanov and Pajic [31] focus on the CPSs communication aspects and study the effects of intermittent data integrity guarantees on system performance under stealthy attacks. Cardenas et al [32] also tackle the security issues in CPSs by identifying the problem of secure control, investigating the defenses that information security and control theory provide, and proposing a set of challenges that need to be addressed to improve the survivability of a CPS in case of cyberattacks.…”

Security-Aware Synthesis Using Delayed-Action Games

“…For localization, the UAV mainly relies on a GPS sensor that can be compromised to effectively steer the UAV away from its original path. While aggressive attacks can be detected, some may remain stealthy by introducing only bounded errors at each step [20,26,22,16]. For example, Fig.…”

Security-Aware Design of Cyber-Physical Systems for Control Applications

“…These attacks are usually studied in two categories (Cárdenas et al, 2008a;Kwon et al, 2013;Lun et al, 2019). First, deceptive attacks, where the adversary interferes in the connection between sensor-controller-actuator and sends incorrect information (Amin et al, 2010;Jovanov and Pajic, 2019;Kwon et al, 2013;Liu et al, 2011;Miao et al, 2016). Second, denial-of-service attacks, where the adversary prevents sensors, controllers, or actuators from receiving data (Amin et al, 2009;Gupta et al, 2010).…”