Theory and implementation of dynamic watermarking for cybersecurity of advanced transportation systems

Dynamic Watermarking-based Defense of Transportation Cyber-physical Systems

“…The latter system, viz., a system of self-driving vehicles, consists of a set of vehicles tracking a given position vs. time trajectory in an automated manner without any human intervention. Some of the results pertaining to this system were earlier reported in our conference paper [19]. In each of these systems, we first show how cyber attacks on sensors can compromise safety and cause collisions between vehicles in the system in spite of the presence of a collision avoidance module that is present in them.…”

“…Specifically, it is shown in these papers that Dynamic Watermarking can secure, in a very precise sense, many broad classes of linear systems from arbitrary attack strategies. One of the central results of these papers, termed as the fundamental security guarantee of Dynamic Watermarking, was also established in the context of a specific nonlinear dynamical model that describes the motion of a vehicle on a plane [19]. In this article, we apply the technique of Dynamic Watermarking to secure two transportation cyberphysical systems of topical interest, namely, (i) an adaptive cruise control system, or a vehicle platoon, and (ii) a system of self-driving vehicles.…”

“…Section 4 contains a description of the laboratory testbed used for our demonstrations and the system model that is used in the subsequent section. To keep the article self-contained, Section 5 first presents a result reported in Reference [19] that extends the fundamental security guarantee of Dynamic Watermarking to the nonlinear system model that describes the transportation system considered in our demonstrations. The essential new aspects of the article are the laboratory demonstrations presented in this section that illustrate the efficacy and practical feasibility of Dynamic Watermarking in securing (i) an adaptive cruise control system and (ii) a system of self-driving vehicles.…”

Robust Dynamic Watermarking for Cyber-Physical Security of Inverter-Based Resources in Power Distribution Systems

“…While the probability distribution of the watermark can be disclosed to other nodes, its actual realization is kept secret. How to analyze the purported measurements and build an attack detector are shown in [2], while the authors in [3] and [4] showcase the application of the dynamic watermarkingbased approach in various control systems. Their hardware experiments have verified the effectiveness of this approach in quickly and accurately detecting cyberattacks on sensor measurements.…”

“…1) We propose an auxiliary test criterion for detecting cyberattacks when the variance of the sensor noise is not known. Since the watermark tests developed in [3] and [4] depend on the statistics of the sensor noise, their performance depends on the accuracy of the knowledge of the statistics. To overcome the vulnerability of the dynamic watermarking approach with respect to this assumption, we propose an auxiliary watermark test that only needs the variance of the watermark superimposed on the control inputs but not the variance of the sensor noise.…”