An Overview on Denial-of-Service Attacks in Control Systems: Attack Models and Security Analyses

Abstract

In this paper, we provide an overview of recent research efforts on networked control systems under denial-of-service attacks. Our goal is to discuss the utility of different attack modeling and analysis techniques proposed in the literature for addressing feedback control, state estimation, and multi-agent consensus problems in the face of jamming attacks in wireless channels and malicious packet drops in multi-hop networks. We discuss several modeling approaches that are employed for capturing the uncertainty in denial-of-service attack strategies. We give an outlook on deterministic constraint-based modeling ideas, game-theoretic and optimization-based techniques and probabilistic modeling approaches. A special emphasis is placed on tail-probability based failure models, which have been recently used for describing jamming attacks that affect signal to interference-plus-noise ratios of wireless channels as well as transmission failures on multi-hop networks due to packet-dropping attacks and non-malicious issues. We explain the use of attack models in the security analysis of networked systems. In addition to the modeling and analysis problems, a discussion is provided also on the recent developments concerning the design of attack-resilient control and communication protocols.

Keywords

• networked control
• cyber-security
• denial-of-service
• jamming attacks
• probabilistic failure models
• stability analysis
• resilient control systems
• multi-agent systems