Window-type detector for stealthy false data injection attack in cyber-physical systems

Abstract

In recent years, the security issues of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have attracted extensive attention from researchers. In this paper, a novel window-type detector (WTD) is designed for stealthy false data injection (FDI) attack targeted at CPSs. In the absence of attack, the evaluation value of a WTD is ${\chi }^2$ distributed because of the existence of Gaussian noise. In the presence of attack, the evaluation value of the WTD is the result of accumulating the residual data caused by attack signals, which is similar to the mechanism of a summation (SUM) detector. It is proved that when the duration of system operation is much larger than the attack duration squared, evaluation value of an SUM detector is ${\chi }^2$ distributed due to the huge number of tolerable historical data. And the structure of finite window size prevents the WTD from failure in such a situation, which equips it with better performance in the detection of attacks with medium duration. Furthermore, it is proved that the closer the window size is to the attack duration, the larger the evaluation value is, which means that the better detection performance could be achieved. Finally, numerical examples are given to verify the characteristics of the WTD.

Keywords:

• Cyber-Physical systems (CPSs)
• false data injection (FDI) attack
• window-type detector (WTD)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chuanyi Ning

Chuanyi Ning received B.Eng. degree in Engineering Mechanics from Beihang University, Beijing, China, in 2021. He is currently pursuing the M.Eng. degree in navigation, guidance and control with the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University. His research interests include networked control system, cyber attack detection, CPSs security and remote state estimation.

Zhiyu Xi

Zhiyu Xi received Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, in 2010. From 2010 to 2012, she was Postdoc Fellow at University of New South Wales where she was then Associate Lecturer. From March 2015 until now, she joined the Beihang University as Associate Professor. Her research interests include sliding mode control, networked control systems and fuzzy control systems.