Connectivity and Energy Consumption of Cyber-Physical Systems under Wi-Fi Attack

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSes) represent a groundbreaking evolution in the realm of information technology and engineering, merging the capabilities of computational elements with physical processes. In these systems, the timeliness of knowledge of a process state or a sensor measurement is important, and it can be measured with a metric called Age of Information (AoI). Since CPSes introduce new and significant security challenges, it is interesting to study cyber-attacks aimed at degrading their AoI. Such attacks have been studied mainly with a theoretic-only approach by past literature. In this paper, we study a CPS under attack using an experimental approach, testing a real denial-of-service attack via Wi-Fi against a Raspberry Pi, with various security configurations. In particular, we consider the Wi-Fi deauthentication attack, which is a highly cost-effective attack from the adversarial point of view. As a further contribution we study the impact of such an attack in terms of energy wasted by a battery-powered CPS sensor.