Design of Stealthy Deception Attacks With Partial System Knowledge

This article investigates the design of stealthy deception attacks with the aim of destroying the estimate performance without knowing the filter gain. The residual used to detect attacks is generated by the parity space approach and the Kullback–Leibler divergence is adopted as the metric of stealthiness. We first give the necessary and sufficient condition for the inexistence of the strictly stealthy attack, which does not change the residual and can lead to unbounded estimate error. When the strictly stealthy attack does not exist, a lower bound of the secondary moment of the estimate error is then derived via the posterior Cramér–Rao bound. The zero-mean Gaussian attack that maximizes this lower bound is obtained by solving a convex optimization problem. The proposed method can also be applied to design stealthy attacks with the aim of destroying the control performance. Finally, a numerical example of longitudinal flight control system is illustrated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack.