Bayesian Quickest Change Detection of an Intruder in Acknowledgments for Private Remote State Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Bayesian quickest change detection method to identify stealthy intruders blocking acknowledgments in remote state estimation systems, enhancing security for cyber-physical systems.

Contribution

It develops a Bayesian change detection approach specifically designed to detect intruders blocking acknowledgments in remote state estimation, addressing a critical security vulnerability.

Findings

Effective detection of intruders in real-time

Improved security for remote state estimation systems

Robustness against acknowledgment blocking attacks

Abstract

For geographically separated cyber-physical systems, state estimation at a remote monitoring or control site is important to ensure stability and reliability of the system. Often for safety or commercial reasons it is necessary to ensure confidentiality of the process state and control information. A current topic of interest is the private transmission of confidential state information. Many transmission encoding schemes rely on acknowledgments, which may be susceptible to interference from an adversary. We consider a stealthy intruder that selectively blocks acknowledgments allowing an eavesdropper to obtain a reliable state estimate defeating an encoding scheme. We utilize Bayesian Quickest Change Detection techniques to quickly detect online the presence of an intruder at both the remote transmitter and receiver.