Cyber Physical Attacks with Control Objectives

TL;DR

This paper models cyber-physical attacks with control objectives, deriving optimal attack strategies that balance system control goals and detection avoidance, demonstrated through a helicopter example.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic programming approach to design optimal attacks on CPS that consider both control and detection evasion objectives.

Findings

Optimal attack strategies are linear feedback of the attacker's state estimate.

Adjusting cost function parameters balances attack effectiveness and stealth.

Numerical example with a remotely-controlled helicopter illustrates the approach.

Abstract

This paper studies attackers with control objectives against cyber-physical systems (CPS). The system is equipped with its own controller and attack detector, and the goal of the attacker is to move the system to a target state while altering the system's actuator input and sensor output to avoid detection. We formulate a cost function that reflects the attacker's goals, and, using dynamic programming, we show that the optimal attack strategy reduces to a linear feedback of the attacker's state estimate. By changing the parameters of the cost function, we show how an attacker can design optimal attacks to balance the control objective and the detection avoidance objective. Finally, we provide a numerical illustration based on a remotely-controlled helicopter under attack.