Denial-of-Service Attacks Against Status Updating in Binary Networked Control Systems

This paper investigates denial-of-service attacks on status updates in a binary networked control system. The physical system is abstracted as a Markovian source with two states: stable and unstable. The source sends status updates over an unreliable wireless channel to a remote controller in the presence of a malicious agent. Upon receiving a new status update, the controller sends back a control signal to stabilize the source if it is in the unstable state. The vulnerability of this system is measured by the age of physical instability—the duration the system remains in the unstable state. Our objective is to design jamming policies for the malicious agent that maximize this measure subject to energy constraints. We first present our results in a single-source scenario, and then extend them to a multi-source scenario. More specifically, we explore: (i) the optimal jamming policy that makes a balance between the system performance degradation and the adversary energy expenditure in a single-source scenario; and (ii) the optimal jamming policy that maximizes the aggregate system performance degradation by selectively jamming a subset of target channels in a multi-source scenario.