Spatio-Temporal Correlations in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Defense Against Data Availability Attacks

Abstract

Many cyber-physical systems (CPS) use geographically distributed instrumentation to monitor and control the operation of the underlying system in real time. The availability of real-time measurements from deployed instrumentation is critical for the operation of CPS, which in turn makes them vulnerable to attacks that limit access to this stream of information. However, the impact of such attacks may be mitigated by exploiting the spatio-temporal correlation in the data streams that exist in many CPS, as shown in this paper. In addition to establishing the extent of spatio-temporal correlations in CPS data stream in the context of natural gas distribution systems, we propose and validate a methodology that exploits these correlations to accurately recreate data that might be lost or unavailable due to cyber attacks.