Fake-Acknowledgment Attack on ACK-based Sensor Power Schedule for Remote State Estimation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how malicious attackers can manipulate ACK signals in sensor power scheduling to degrade remote state estimation, proposing attack strategies and sensor defenses under limited attacker capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel attack model on ACK-based power schedules and analyzes sensor response strategies to maintain estimation accuracy.

Findings

Limited attacker capabilities can significantly impact estimation performance.

Sensors can switch to offline schedules to mitigate attacks under certain conditions.

Proposed attack strategies effectively disrupt remote state estimation.

Abstract

We consider a class of malicious attacks against remote state estimation. A sensor with limited resources adopts an acknowledgement (ACK)-based online power schedule to improve the remote state estimation performance. A malicious attacker can modify the ACKs from the remote estimator and convey fake information to the sensor. When the capability of the attacker is limited, we propose an attack strategy for the attacker and analyze the corresponding effect on the estimation performance. The possible responses of the sensor are studied and a condition for the sensor to discard ACKs and switch from online schedule to offline schedule is provided.