691 research outputs found
Synthesis of Covert Actuator Attackers for Free
In this paper, we shall formulate and address a problem of covert actuator
attacker synthesis for cyber-physical systems that are modelled by
discrete-event systems. We assume the actuator attacker partially observes the
execution of the closed-loop system and is able to modify each control command
issued by the supervisor on a specified attackable subset of controllable
events. We provide straightforward but in general exponential-time reductions,
due to the use of subset construction procedure, from the covert actuator
attacker synthesis problems to the Ramadge-Wonham supervisor synthesis
problems. It then follows that it is possible to use the many techniques and
tools already developed for solving the supervisor synthesis problem to solve
the covert actuator attacker synthesis problem for free. In particular, we show
that, if the attacker cannot attack unobservable events to the supervisor, then
the reductions can be carried out in polynomial time. We also provide a brief
discussion on some other conditions under which the exponential blowup in state
size can be avoided. Finally, we show how the reduction based synthesis
procedure can be extended for the synthesis of successful covert actuator
attackers that also eavesdrop the control commands issued by the supervisor.Comment: The paper has been accepted for the journal Discrete Event Dynamic
System
Attack-Resilient Supervisory Control of Discrete-Event Systems
In this work, we study the problem of supervisory control of discrete-event
systems (DES) in the presence of attacks that tamper with inputs and outputs of
the plant. We consider a very general system setup as we focus on both
deterministic and nondeterministic plants that we model as finite state
transducers (FSTs); this also covers the conventional approach to modeling DES
as deterministic finite automata. Furthermore, we cover a wide class of attacks
that can nondeterministically add, remove, or rewrite a sensing and/or
actuation word to any word from predefined regular languages, and show how such
attacks can be modeled by nondeterministic FSTs; we also present how the use of
FSTs facilitates modeling realistic (and very complex) attacks, as well as
provides the foundation for design of attack-resilient supervisory controllers.
Specifically, we first consider the supervisory control problem for
deterministic plants with attacks (i) only on their sensors, (ii) only on their
actuators, and (iii) both on their sensors and actuators. For each case, we
develop new conditions for controllability in the presence of attacks, as well
as synthesizing algorithms to obtain FST-based description of such
attack-resilient supervisors. A derived resilient controller provides a set of
all safe control words that can keep the plant work desirably even in the
presence of corrupted observation and/or if the control words are subjected to
actuation attacks. Then, we extend the controllability theorems and the
supervisor synthesizing algorithms to nondeterministic plants that satisfy a
nonblocking condition. Finally, we illustrate applicability of our methodology
on several examples and numerical case-studies
A Polynomial Approach to Verifying the Existence of a Threatening Sensor Attacker
The development of cyber-physical systems (CPS) has brought much attention of researchers to cyber-attack and cyber-security. A sensor attacker targeting on a supervised discrete event system can modify a set of sensor readings and cause the closed-loop system to reach undesirable states. In this letter, we propose a new attack detection mechanism under which the supervisor only needs to keep track of the last observable event received. Given a plant and a supervisor enforcing a state specification, we define a sensor attacker threatening if it may cause the closed-loop system to enter a forbidden state. Our goal is to verify whether there exists such a threatening sensor attacker for a given controlled system. A new structure, called All Sensor Attack (ASA), is proposed to capture all possible sensor attacks launched by the attacker. Based on the ASA automaton, a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a stealthy threatening sensor attacker is presented. Finally, we show that the condition can be verified in polynomial time
On Decidability of Existence of Nonblocking Supervisors Resilient to Smart Sensor Attacks
Cybersecurity of discrete event systems (DES) has been gaining more and more
attention recently, due to its high relevance to the so-called 4th industrial
revolution that heavily relies on data communication among networked systems.
One key challenge is how to ensure system resilience to sensor and/or actuator
attacks, which may tamper data integrity and service availability. In this
paper we focus on some key decidability issues related to smart sensor attacks.
We first present a sufficient and necessary condition that ensures the
existence of a smart sensor attack, which reveals a novel demand-supply
relationship between an attacker and a controlled plant, represented as a set
of risky pairs. Each risky pair consists of a damage string desired by the
attacker and an observable sequence feasible in the supervisor such that the
latter induces a sequence of control patterns, which allows the damage string
to happen. It turns out that each risky pair can induce a smart weak sensor
attack. Next, we show that, when the plant, supervisor and damage language are
regular, it is computationally feasible to remove all such risky pairs from the
plant behaviour, via a genuine encoding scheme, upon which we are able to
establish our key result that the existence of a nonblocking supervisor
resilient to smart sensor attacks is decidable. To the best of our knowledge,
this is the first result of its kind in the DES literature on cyber attacks.
The proposed decision process renders a specific synthesis procedure that
guarantees to compute a resilient supervisor whenever it exists, which so far
has not been achieved in the literature.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure
Formal Approaches to Control System Security From Static Analysis to Runtime Enforcement
With the advent of Industry 4.0, industrial facilities and critical infrastructures are transforming into an ecosystem of heterogeneous physical and cyber components, such as programmable logic controllers, increasingly interconnected and therefore exposed to cyber-physical attacks, i.e., security breaches in cyberspace that may adversely affect the physical processes underlying industrial control systems. The main contributions of this thesis follow two research strands that address the security concerns of industrial control systems via formal methodologies. As our first contribution, we propose a formal approach based on model checking and statistical model checking, within the MODEST TOOLSET, to analyse the impact of attacks targeting nontrivial control systems equipped with an intrusion detection system (IDS) capable of detecting and mitigating attacks. Our goal is to evaluate the impact of cyber-physical attacks, i.e., attacks targeting sensors and/or actuators of the system with potential consequences on the safety of the inner physical process. Our security analysis estimates both the physical impact of the attacks and the performance of the IDS. As our second contribution, we propose a formal approach based on runtime enforcement to ensure specification compliance in networks of controllers, possibly compromised by colluding malware that may tamper with actuator commands, sensor readings, and inter-controller communications. Our approach relies on an ad-hoc sub-class of Ligatti et al.’s edit automata to enforce controllers represented in Hennessy and Regan’s Timed Process Language. We define a synthesis algorithm that, given an alphabet P of observable actions and a timed correctness property e, returns a monitor that enforces the property e during the execution of any (potentially corrupted) controller with alphabet P, and complying with the property e. Our monitors correct and suppress incorrect actions coming from corrupted controllers and emit actions in full autonomy when the controller under scrutiny is not able to do so in a correct manner. Besides classical requirements, such as transparency and soundness, the proposed enforcement enjoys deadlock- and diverge-freedom of monitored controllers, together with compositionality when dealing with networks of controllers. Finally, we test the proposed enforcement mechanism on a non-trivial case study, taken from the context of industrial water treatment systems, in which the controllers are injected with different malware with different malicious goals
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