Optimal Denial-of-Service Attack Scheduling With Energy Constraint

• Published in: IEEE transactions on automatic control Vol. 60; no. 11; pp. 3023 - 3028
• Main Authors: Zhang, Heng, Cheng, Peng, Shi, Ling, Chen, Jiming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.11.2015; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Channel estimation; Channels; Computer crime; DoS attack; energy constraint; Estimation error; Estimators; Intrusion; Intrusion detection systems; Network security; Optimization; Remote sensors; Sampling; Schedules; Sensors; State estimation; Wireless communication; Wireless sensor networks; state estimation; DoS attack; energy constraint
• ISSN: 0018-9286; 1558-2523
• DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2015.2409905

Security of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has gained increasing attention in recent years. Most existing works mainly investigate the system performance given some attacking patterns. In this technical note, we investigate how an attacker should schedule its Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks to degrade the system performance. Specifically, we consider the scenario where a sensor sends its data to a remote estimator through a wireless channel, while an energy-constrained attacker decides whether to jam the channel at each sampling time. We construct optimal attack schedules to maximize the expected average estimation error at the remote estimator. We also provide the optimal attack schedules when a special intrusion detection system (IDS) at the estimator is given. We further discuss the optimal attack schedules when the sensor has energy constraint. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimal attack schedules.