Model-free False Data Injection Attack in Networked Control Systems: A Feedback Optimization Approach

Security issues have gathered growing interest within the control systems community, as physical components and communication networks are increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this context, recent literature has studied increasingly sophisticated
false data injection
attacks, with the aim to design mitigative measures that improve the systems' security. Notably, data-driven attack strategies – whereby the system dynamics is oblivious to the adversary – have received increasing attention. However, many of the existing works on the topic rely on the implicit assumption of linear system dynamics, significantly limiting their scope. Contrary to that, in this work, we design and analyze a
truly
model-free false data injection attack that applies to general linear and nonlinear systems. More specifically, we aim at designing an injected signal that steers the output of the system toward a (maliciously chosen) trajectory. We do so by designing a zeroth-order feedback optimization policy and jointly using probing signals for real-time measurements. We then characterize the quality of the proposed model-free attack through its optimality gap, which is affected by the dimensions of the attack signal, the number of iterations performed, and the convergence rate of the system. Finally, we extend the proposed attack scheme to systems with internal noise. Extensive simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed attack scheme.