A Game-Theoretic Approach to Secure Estimation and Control for Cyber-Physical Systems with a Digital Twin

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic framework using a Digital Twin and signaling game to detect and mitigate stealthy estimation attacks in cyber-physical systems, ensuring system stability.

Contribution

It develops a novel defense strategy combining a Chi-square detector in a Digital Twin with a signaling game approach to counter intelligent stealth attacks.

Findings

Defense strategies effectively mitigate attack impact

System stability is guaranteed under proposed methods

Framework successfully detects stealthy attacks in simulations

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) play an increasingly significant role in many critical applications. These valuable applications attract various sophisticated attacks. This paper considers a stealthy estimation attack, which aims to modify the state estimation of the CPSs. The intelligent attackers can learn defense strategies and use clandestine attack strategies to avoid detection. To address the issue, we design a Chi-square detector in a Digital Twin (DT), which is an online digital model of the physical system. We use a Signaling Game with Evidence (SGE) to find the optimal attack and defense strategies. Our analytical results show that the proposed defense strategies can mitigate the impact of the attack on the physical estimation and guarantee the stability of the CPSs. Finally, we use an illustrative application to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework.