Cyber-Physical Attacks With Control Objectives

Journal Article · Fri Aug 18 04:00:00 UTC 2017 · IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TAC.2017.2741778 · OSTI ID:1433632

Chen, Yuan  ^[1]; Kar, Soummya  ^[2]; Moura, Jose M. F.  ^[2]

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1. Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA (United States). Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering; University of Arkansas
2. Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA (United States). Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering

This study studies attackers with control objectives against cyber-physical systems (CPSs). The goal of the attacker is to counteract the CPS's controller and move the system to a target state while evading detection. We formulate a cost function that reflects the attacker's goals, and, using dynamic programming, we show that the optimal attack strategy reduces to a linear feedback of the attacker's state estimate. By changing the parameters of the cost function, we show how an attacker can design optimal attacks to balance the control objective and the detection avoidance objective. In conclusion, we provide a numerical illustration based on a remotely controlled helicopter under attack.

• Research Organization: Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (OE); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (United States)
• Grant/Contract Number: OE0000779
• OSTI ID: 1433632
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 63; ISSN 0018-9286
• Publisher: IEEECopyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English