Event-Based Covert Cyber-Attack in Switching Cyber-Physical Systems: Design and Detection Mechanisms

In this paper, both design and detection of event-based covert cyber-attacks in switching Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is introduced and investigated. First, the design problem of event-based covert cyber-attack for switched CPS will be addressed. In the developed covert cyber-attack, attackers aim to make the system follow their reference signals while remaining stealthy from the Command and Control (C&C) center. To inject the attack signal on the input channels, attackers try to access the plant’s information in an event-based fashion. On the other hand, in order to detect this type of cyber-attack on the C&C side, a switching event-based auxiliary system is considered along with the plant. By considering an event-based switched filter to estimate the output of the auxiliary system, cyber-attacks are detected based on the residuals that are obtained from the filter. The simulation results for a numerical case study demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in terms of both the detection performance and reducing the communication load necessary to achieve this objective.