Stealthy Attack on Remote Control System With Local Controller and Its Countermeasures

Cyber–physical systems (CPSs) driven by a local controller and a remote controller have been gaining significant research interest in recent years due to its application scenarios in practice, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this article, we consider the security issue in the remote control system with a local controller under stealthy attacks. Under this framework, one controller is designed locally based on the limited measurements collected by a local sensor, and the other controller is designed remotely and is transmitted to the actuator through a wireless communication channel, which may suffer malicious attacks due to its openness. To defend attacks on remote control signal, the K–L divergence-based detector or
$\chi ^{2}$
detector is often adopted. However, there may be attackers adopting stealthy attacks, which can bypass such detectors. Therefore, we analyze the existence of such attacks, and analytically characterize the worst-estimation performance degradation induced by the remote control signal attack. Further, we construct the optimal attack signal to achieve the upper bound on the estimation performance degradation. In addition, we also give countermeasures against such stealthy attacks. Simulations are provided to illustrate the proposed results.