Virus spreading analysis in networked control systems: A transport dynamics based approach

Networked control systems (NCSs) are vulnerable to the cyber-threats of computer viruses. The cyberattacks on NCSs must intensively influence physical processes such as the safety-critical nuclear plants, through feedback actuation. To keep the cybersecurity to design proper anti-virus scheme, it is necessary to study the virus spreading dynamics on NCSs. In this paper, the virus spreading is modeled as a transport phenomenon. By extending the ectropy for thermodynamic systems, the stability and equilibrium states of the processes of single virus spreading in a heterogeneous NCS as well as multiple viruses spreading in a homogeneous NCS are analyzed. Numerical simulation results verify the theoretic rationality and show the influence of system parameters to the virus spreading.