Decentralized Stealth Attacks on Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel decentralized approach for stealth attacks on cyber-physical systems using game theory to minimize mutual information and detection probability, validated through numerical experiments.

Contribution

It formulates decentralized stealth attack strategies as potential games and proposes a best response dynamics to find Nash Equilibria, advancing attack design methods.

Findings

Proven existence and uniqueness of Nash Equilibrium in the proposed game model.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of the attack strategy on IEEE test systems.

Validated the feasibility of using game-theoretic techniques for decentralized attack construction.

Abstract

Decentralized stealth attack constructions that minimize the mutual information between the state variables and the measurements are proposed. The attack constructions are formulated as random Gaussian attacks targeting Cyber-physical systems that aims at minimizing the mutual information between the state variables and measurements while constraining the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the distribution of the measurements under attacks and the distribution of the measurements without attacks. The proposed information metrics adopted measure the disruption and attack detection both globally and locally. The decentralized attack constructions are formulated in a framework of normal games. The global and local information metrics yield games with global and local objectives in disruption and attack detection. We have proven the games are potential games and the convexity of the potential functions followed by the uniqueness and the achievability of the Nash Equilibrium, accordingly. We proposed a best response dynamics to achieve the Nash Equilibrium of the games. We numerically evaluate the performance of the proposed decentralized stealth random attacks on IEEE test systems and show it is feasible to exploit game theoretic techniques in decentralized attack constructions.