Social Collective Attack Model and Procedures for Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

A large-scale Cyber-Physical System (CPS) such as a smart grid usually provides service to a vast number of users as a public utility. Security is one of the most vital aspects in such critical infrastructures. The existing CPS security usually considers the attack from the information domain to the physical domain, such as injecting false data to damage sensing. Social Collective Attack on CPS (SCAC) is proposed as a new kind of attack that intrudes into the social domain and manipulates the collective behavior of social users to disrupt the physical subsystem. To provide a systematic description framework for such threats, we extend MITRE ATT&CK, the most used cyber adversary behavior modeling framework, to cover social, cyber, and physical domains. We discuss how the disinformation may be constructed and eventually leads to physical system malfunction through the social-cyber-physical interfaces, and we analyze how the adversaries launch disinformation attacks to better manipulate collective behavior. Finally, simulation analysis of SCAC in a smart grid is provided to demonstrate the possibility of such an attack.

Keywords

• cyber-physical system
• security
• collective behavior
• social users
• threat model
• disinformation