Resilience of Cyber-Physical Systems to Covert Attacks by Exploiting an Improved Encryption Scheme

In recent years, the integration of encryption schemes into cyber-physical systems (CPS) has attracted much attention to improve the confidentiality of sensor signals and control input signals sent over the network. However, in principle an adversary can still modify the sensor signals and the control input signals, even though he does not know the concrete values of the signals. In this paper, we shall first show that a standard encryption scheme can not prevent some sophisticated attacks such as covert attacks, which remain invisible in the CPS with encrypted communication and a conventional diagnosis system. To cope with this problem, an improved encryption scheme is proposed to mask the communication and to cancel the influence of the attack signal out of the system. The basic idea is to swap the plaintext and the generated random value in the somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme to prevent a direct access of the adversary to the transmitted plaintext. It will be shown that the CPS with the improved encryption scheme is resilient to covert attacks. The proposed encryption scheme and the CPS structure are finally illustrated through the well-established quadruple-tank process.