Effects of Jamming Attacks on Wireless Networked Control Systems Under Disturbance

TL;DR

This paper examines how jamming attacks impact the stability of wireless networked control systems facing disturbances, identifying conditions under which stability can be maintained despite interference.

Contribution

It characterizes the effect of jamming on system stability with disturbances and proposes conditions on interference power to ensure stability.

Findings

Jamming can prevent stability even if the system is stable without attack.

Stability can be achieved if the average jamming power is sufficiently restricted.

Results are demonstrated on a fading wireless channel example.

Abstract

Jamming attacks on wireless networked control systems are investigated for the scenarios where the system dynamics face exogenous disturbance. In particular, the control input packets are assumed to be transmitted from a controller to a remotely located linear plant over an insecure wireless communication channel that is subject to jamming attacks. The time-varying likelihood of transmission failures on this channel depends on the power of the jamming interference signal emitted by an attacker. We show that jamming attacks can prevent stability when the system faces disturbance, even if the attacked system without disturbance is stable. We also show that stability under jamming and disturbance can be achieved if the average jamming interference power is restricted in a certain way that we characterize in the paper. We illustrate our results on an example networked control system with a fading wireless channel, where the outage probability is affected by jamming attacks.