Use of Switching Controllers for Mitigation of Active Identification Attacks in Networked Control Systems

The literature regarding to cyber-physical attacks in Networked Control Systems (NCS) indicates that covert and accurate attacks must be planned based on an accurate knowledge about the model of the attacked system. In this sense, the literature on NCS recognizes the Active System Identification attack as a tool to provide the attacker with the required system models. However, there is still a lack of discussion about countermeasures for this specific attack. In this sense, this work proposes the use of a randomly switching controller as a countermeasure for the Active System Identification attack. The simulation results indicate that this countermeasure is capable to mitigate the mentioned attack at the same time that it performs a satisfactory plant control.