Generating Sustainability-Targeting Attacks For Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mathematical framework for creating stealthy attacks targeting the sustainability goals of cyber-physical systems, demonstrating their potential impact on long-term costs.

Contribution

It presents a novel max-min formulation and an algorithm to generate minimal-effort, high-impact attacks on linear CPSs with stealth constraints.

Findings

The framework models sustainability-targeting attacks mathematically.

An algorithm effectively constructs stealthy attacks with maximum impact.

Simulations show significant impact on CPS sustainability costs.

Abstract

Sustainability-targeting attacks (STA) are a growing threat to cyber-physical system (CPS)-based infrastructure, as sustainability goals become an integral part of CPS objectives. STA can be especially disruptive if it impacts the long-term sustainability cost of CPS, while its performance goals remain within acceptable parameters. Thus, in this work, we propose a general mathematical framework for modeling such stealthy STA and derive the feasibility conditions for generating a minimum-effort maximum-impact STA on a linear CPS using a max-min formulation. A gradient ascent descent algorithm is used to construct this attack policy with an added constraint on stealthiness. An illustrative example has been simulated to demonstrate the impact of the generated attack on the sustainability cost of the CPS.