Bilateral Cognitive Security Games in Networked Control Systems under Stealthy Injection Attacks

TL;DR

This paper models a strategic security game in networked control systems where both attacker and defender have cognitive reasoning abilities, proposing methods to compute optimal policies and analyzing the impact of cognitive levels on security outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a bilateral cognitive security game framework with new concepts of cognitive mismatch and resonance, and provides a method to compute strategies for agents with arbitrary cognitive abilities.

Findings

Cognitive levels influence security strategies and outcomes.

A sufficient condition ensures policy convergence despite cognitive level changes.

Numerical simulations validate the proposed framework and methods.

Abstract

This paper studies a strategic security problem in networked control systems under stealthy false data injection attacks. The security problem is modeled as a bilateral cognitive security game between a defender and an adversary, each possessing cognitive reasoning abilities. The adversary with an adversarial cognitive ability strategically attacks some interconnections of the system with the aim of disrupting the network performance while remaining stealthy to the defender. Meanwhile, the defender with a defense cognitive ability strategically monitors some nodes to impose the stealthiness constraint with the purpose of minimizing the worst-case disruption caused by the adversary. Within the proposed bilateral cognitive security framework, the preferred cognitive levels of the two strategic agents are formulated in terms of two newly proposed concepts, cognitive mismatch and cognitive resonance. Moreover, we propose a method to compute the policies for the defender and the adversary with arbitrary cognitive abilities. A sufficient condition is established under which an increase in cognitive levels does not alter the policies for the defender and the adversary, ensuring convergence. The obtained results are validated through numerical simulations.