A technique to detect and mitigate false data injection attacks in Cyber–Physical Systems

Abstract

The advancement in communication, computation, and control technology has led to the integration of the cyber-world and physical-world. This has also increased the incidence of malicious attacks in Cyber–Physical Systems (CPSs), of which false data injection (FDI) attacks are critical. FDI attacks can simultaneously modify the cyber-data and physical data in CPSs. An attacker can guess the system parameters and disrupt the system’s operation by designing stealthy attack sequences. There must be more than a detection scheme to defend against FDI attacks. Therefore, a combined detection and mitigation mechanism is required to secure the CPSs against FDI attacks. This paper discusses a technique for detecting and mitigating FDI attacks where the physical system, sensor measurements, and actuator inputs are compromised simultaneously. We use a watermarking scheme for attack detection, and we use the control input synthesis and operating region concept for attack mitigation. The defender can detect the attacks and reduce the attacker’s effectiveness. A numerical example from a trajectory tracking control system is taken to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed security scheme.