A Dynamic Coding Scheme to Prevent Covert Cyber-Attacks in Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates conditions enabling covert cyber-attacks in cyber-physical systems and proposes a dynamic coding scheme, under certain secure communication assumptions, to effectively prevent such attacks, demonstrated through a flight control case study.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dynamic coding scheme as a countermeasure against covert cyber-attacks in CPS, based on identified necessary and sufficient disruption resource conditions.

Findings

The coding scheme prevents covert attacks under specific secure communication conditions.

Conditions for adversaries to execute covert attacks are characterized.

Numerical case study confirms the scheme's effectiveness in a flight control system.

Abstract

In this paper, we address two main problems in the context of covert cyber-attacks in cyber-physical systems (CPS). First, we aim to investigate and develop necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of disruption resources of the CPS that enable adversaries to execute covert cyber-attacks. These conditions can be utilized to identify the input and output communication channels that are needed by adversaries to execute these attacks. Second, this paper introduces and develops a dynamic coding scheme as a countermeasure against covert cyber-attacks. Under certain conditions and assuming the existence of one secure input and two secure output communication channels, the proposed dynamic coding scheme prevents adversaries from executing covert cyber-attacks. A numerical case study of a flight control system is provided to demonstrate the capabilities of our proposed and developed dynamic coding scheme.