An Overview on Denial-of-Service Attacks in Control Systems: Attack Models and Security Analyses

Abstract

In this paper, we provide an overview of recent research efforts on networked control systems under denial-of-service attacks. Our goal is to discuss the utility of different attack modeling and analysis techniques proposed in the literature for addressing feedback control, state estimation, and multi-agent consensus problems in the face of jamming attacks in wireless channels and malicious packet drops in multi-hop networks. We discuss several modeling approaches that are employed for capturing the uncertainty in denial-of-service attack strategies. We give an outlook on deterministic constraint-based modeling ideas, game-theoretic and optimization-based techniques and probabilistic modeling approaches. A special emphasis is placed on tail-probability based failure models, which have been recently used for describing jamming attacks that affect signal to interference-plus-noise ratios of wireless channels as well as transmission failures on multi-hop networks due to packet-dropping attacks and non-malicious issues. We explain the use of attack models in the security analysis of networked systems. In addition to the modeling and analysis problems, a discussion is provided also on the recent developments concerning the design of attack-resilient control and communication protocols.

Distributed Robust Dimensionality Reduction Fusion Estimation Under DoS Attacks and Uncertain Covariances

“…Most of existing DoS attacks assumptions need distributed information of attacks. For example, the occurrence of attacks is assumed to follow a Markov transition probability distribution [33], or the maximum number of attacks during a separated time period [45] is assumed to be given. These assumptions are sometimes not available in practical situations, and the introduced parameters (i.e., attack statistics, transition probability and maximum number of attacks) are hard to be determined in advance.…”

CNA Tactics and Techniques: A Structure Proposal

“…While regarding these techniques, it is mandatory to mention jamming, a subset of denial of service attacks in which malicious nodes block legitimate communication by causing intentional interference in networks [53] and which is a key threat to cyber physical systems [54][55][56][57]; while jamming could be included inside an interference category for degradation or disruption operations, especially in WiFi sensor networks, we cannot consider jamming inside CNA techniques as it is related to Electronic Warfare. Anyway, interference techniques exist in CNA operations, with most well-known instances of this category relying upon features of the TCP protocol [58]; inside this category we can include packet dropping [59,60], an attack whose goal is to make the source and the destination perceive disconnection or degradation of path quality. Of course, while referring to degradation not all packets are to be dropped-as it could be easily detected, and will fall into the disruption tactic-but only a subset of the packets is dropped, thereby making it more difficult to detect [59].…”

Stochastic model predictive control framework for resilient cyber-physical systems: review and perspectives

“…To account for a more practical scenario, limitations on attack frequencies and attack duration are taken into consideration. A complete survey of DoS attacks modelling in CPS has been reported in [40].…”